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Meet Violette de Ayala Violette de Ayala is a Cuban-American serial and social Entrepreneur, Founder of FemCity, and virtual mentor to over 20,000 women. She’s also the International best-selling author of The Self-Guided Guru© Life Lessons for the Everyday Human. Violette has been quoted in Success, Forbes, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Fast Company, Thrive Global, Medium, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Small Business, Authority, Business Insider News as a small business expert overall. Let's talk a little bit about FemCity. You founded this global women's networking organization, just tell us a little bit about that. I started femme city in 2009. I myself was looking for community in my life. And even after going out to many, many networking events here in Miami that are all spectacular and great. I always left feeling a little depleted and like I was missing some sort of connection to others. And after doing that for a couple years, I just decided to start something very small, but it would be just for 20 women here Miami and we would just gather once a month and help to support each other in business and personal development. And throughout the years, because of pictures on Facebook that we initially posted and launching other chapters, we started watching more and more. And now we are a members only organization. We help women in business personal development, and we create communities around the world. You've got a couple new chapters opening up in all different parts of the world. Would you like to share some of those places? We moved out, so we grow very organically. And you can see our growth patterns starting in Miami, and then we kind of grew up the east coast and then moved over to the west coast. And then we started growing in Canada, in Toronto. And so it's natural for us to start launching in other countries as well. So before all of this started happening, we had started kind of having the conversations of launching in Paris and Madrid and in Dubai and we're excited to continuously grow and create communities for women with personal development, online resources, literally anything that they need in order to design and create the life that they envision for themselves. So you're an international best-selling author. What inspired you to write a book while you've already got this global organization underneath your feet? So it's actually a really funny story. Many years ago, some of our members kept asking me for a book, oh, you should write a business book. I started to write it. I reviewed it. I'm like, gosh, this is horrible. This is like a horrible book. I can't do this. So I kind of put that on the back burner. And then I had a goal of writing it by a certain time. And I thought I just need to write it. Let me just write it the way I want to write it in the voice that I generally use when I'm speaking or lecturing. And so I wrote this book, it's 10 chapters, with life lessons that I grew from and how I actually transitioned and pivoted my life stories from going from welfare to wealth stories of being married to someone for 20 years divorcing and getting back together. And just even like the stories of growing up with a mother who was a drug addict and suffered from mental illness. So all these kinds of stories that people knew about, that I lectured. That's where that book was really birthed from. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So I believe you can network anywhere, right? I think my favorite networking story is I was asked to be a speaker on a panel many, many years ago for Gymboree, here in Miami, which is where I live and I went and we networked a little bit before the panel started and then we networked a little bit after and I got the opportunity to meet the founder of Gymboree, she was also on the panel, Joan Barnes, and we just connected. It was like we had known each other our whole entire lives. And she ended up we exchanged information like cell phone and emails. And the next day we chatted, and we couldn't stop chatting and we were like texting each other like all these ideas and she really became an iconic person in my journey through being an entrepreneur. And that all came from networking. How do you stay in front of or best nurture this network and this community that you've created? I feel that each member that we have is a friend and they feel like I'm really responsible for their success. And every day I wake up like thinking to myself, how can I help more in a bigger way? What can I do to help others to grow the business that they envision for themselves to design their life to live life in a balanced way. And when you come across, anytime you're networking, when you come across from the point of view of wanting to serve and help others, it always comes back to you. So what advice would you offer the professional who's looking to grow their network? The advice that I would give is to show up all the time anywhere ready to create connections. So whether you're walking your dog, or going to the farmers market or going to a networking event or whatever it is that you have, you have the power to meet people that can pivot your life in dramatic ways. And if you keep your energy open to receiving that, and then giving, being a person to give of yourself to fully offer advice to be kind to others, those people will remember you forever and ever. And that's really when you talk about business growth. It's always about the contacts and connections that you have, and that they like you because humans do business with humans they like and respect. Between digital networking or traditional networking which do you find more value in? I would say both of them, honestly. Sometimes I've met friends on social media. So I think if you come across from the same point of view of being of service, being an asset to that person, oh, I thought of you, I got this invitation for this networking event, I thought of you or I have this contact, I thought it would be a great introduction. So I think a lot of that can occur in the digital world. If you have the heart in it. I think they're both equally valuable. I mean, at the end of the day, humans like to see each other's eyes, like to see each other and you can exponentially grow that relationship when you're in that physical place. But you can still really create great relationships through digital. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of or differently with regards to your professional career? Believe in yourself, that would be one that's been huge for me. There's so many years that I wasted and so much money lost because I didn't believe in myself. I didn't think I could do things on my own. I felt like I needed a crutch, I felt like I couldn't do this because I didn't have that degree from Wharton Business School and all these just ridiculous stories I made up in my mind that held me back. So that would be the biggest thing right there. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation, who would be the one person that you would love to connect with? And do you think you could do it within the sixth degree? I'd love to connect with Oprah. So another mentor of mine, I met at a birthday party for our girls when my youngest was in kindergarten. We met and I was talking about Oprah. She must have just started her channel at the time. And I mentioned it and she said, oh, my gosh, I told Oprah that exact same thing the other day. I have a couple of those with Oprah like that one degree or two degrees. So I'm just hoping one day to get a chance to meet her. But it has not happened yet. Any final word or advice for listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? Be of service, follow up with people, stay connected, and you're not going to be able to do it all on your own. You're going to need people around you to offer mentorship and advice and referrals and recommendations and connections. So it's all about people and getting out there and the more people that you know, the more opportunities come your way. How to connect with Violette: Website: https://femcity.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/violettedeayala/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ViolettedeAyala Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/violettedeayala LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/violettedeayala/

Sometimes I've found a way to make real changes in my life was when I was able to view something from some other example and make an analogy or comparison ... Using the psychology of video gaming, simulation theory and completing levels, loops or stages can be amazingly similar to the steps we need to take in our waking reality to have similar desired results.. The results of clearing the stage, or loop so we can advance to the next part of the game.. or life stage... The value and success rate of resuming a challenging level after you've paused the game and took a break... is significant ... We can bring that virtual pause into this reality through meditation... Lets DIVE IN.. MUCH LOVE TODAY !!!   Likeattractslike11.com

When in Doubt, Drink Water Regardless of our age, most of us do not drink enough water, so therefore we may be feeling symptoms of dehydration that we ignore, because it feels normal. And all too often people end up at the doctor's office for symptoms of dehydration.  One of the intentions of these podcasts is to tap into wisdom and intelligence that is always with us. When we become more aware of what's happening physically and in all other ways, we become more empowered to make choices that keep us healthy, if healthy is what we want. Sometimes I've chosen less-healthy choices, and the consequences are symptoms that make me think I need to go to the doctor, when really I just need to make different choices. What choices are you re-evaluating after listening to this podcast? Let me know on Facebook!   - - - -  For more blogs, books and videos, or if you are interesting in coaching or training with Dr. Rosie, check out her website: www.theparadigmshifts.com

I’m coming to you today with another guest who's going to share her great insight into how to make freelancing work for you.  She’s also going to share when to decide that maybe it's not the right fit, and you want to scale it down or work your freelance business in a different way. My guest today is Dani Belvin who is a New Mexican theatre artist, educator, and arts administrator driven by the desire to make a positive impact in Albuquerque. She holds an MFA in Theater and a BA in Theatre, Education, and Asian Studies. As an educator, she's worked with students of all ages in New Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, and China. As a performer, she's also studied 12 different Asian theatre and dance forms. And in addition to working full time in arts administration at an art center, she teaches part time at the college level and produces and co-host of the podcast, Biracial Unicorns.  It is a podcast about race, gender, and pop culture. We're going to be talking about things that are a little bit off the beaten path for where a lot of the traditional freelance conversations go.  Which is, you're working it as a side hustle to bring it into a full-time gig.  You’re potentially using it to grow an even bigger and bigger freelance business. My guest today is Dani.  I asked her what she would say her background is with freelancing. She shared that she was an accidental freelancer. She feels like she’s heard me say that about myself. She didn't have the intention to freelance after she went to graduate school.  She went to graduate school with the intention of becoming a college professor. And that turned out to be a lot more difficult than she first thought. So she knew that she wanted to teach.  And because her degrees happened to be in the arts... Well, there are a lot of very tangible transferable skills. But a lot of businesses don't see it that way. So it wasn't to fall into a traditional sort of job. So she knew she wanted to work in the arts.  And she knew she wanted to teach. So she just accidentally fell into doing contract work in that way.  She was following through with any sort of opportunity and putting herself out there so that I could be in the classroom or be doing arts as a job. So it started as kind of a way to support adjunct teaching. As far as college goes, she was teaching just a couple of classes a semester in the college setting. She started to pick up more and more other teaching jobs.  Part of it was through theatre company that she was a part of. And then part of it was through just other contacts she had made in the art world. I asked Dani, “Was most of your freelancing was in teaching positions? Or were you doing different types of services for your clients?” For the most part, it was teaching. The nature of theatre tends to be a lot of independent contract work as well. So while most of it was teaching, some of it was actually stage managing or performing in the theater world as well. So when you were doing a lot of this freelance work, what did you feel were the benefits of choosing that instead of something that would be like a full-time tenure track or a Professor sort of situation? The thing that Dani loves the most about freelancing was the freedom and flexibility to choose what she was doing.  And she could turn down gigs that did not align with her values, didn't align with her schedule, or weren't interesting to her. So she really enjoyed that aspect. And she enjoyed the aspect of creating her own schedule. All of that was, was really freeing and really just gratifying to her. But ultimately, it seems like that wasn't something that Dani wanted to stick with forever.  Which is kind of the nature of a lot of not just business, but life for creatives too.  We often discover along the way what we do and don't like or pick up some new passion and follow that thread. So can you talk a little bit more about that process of maybe deciding, “Okay, I don't want to freelance forever”, at least in this particular way, and how you made that transition? Dani shared that for her it was a lot of burnout. So she was working a lot and in a lot of different places.  That’s is part of the nature of freelancing.  She felt like she was spending a lot of time driving from gig to gig. And just constantly on the go.  It was exhausting. For her, the move into a full time position meant having the stability of  working in one place.  It meant having the stability of having those set hours. And she thinks this is true for a lot of creatives. And for a lot of freelancers. It's very difficult when you're starting out to figure out those boundaries.  She shared that she was more than happy to constantly be working. And for her that just was not sustainable. She was having a hard time figuring out where she was going to draw those boundaries with things like when was she not working? When was she working?” So that was really weighing on her. Then a lot of it was the boring life things like needing health insurance and figuring out those those steps for myself. And while it is possible through freelance work,  it seemed very difficult for her.  And she had to evaluate if this was the type of work that she wanted to continue doing, or if she wanted to shift into something else. So how did you make that shift into doing something else on a full time basis? Was that something where you were very intentional in your job hunting or did a job just sort of pop up and you're like, “Okay, this is it. This is my chance to make a move.”? Dani shared that it was more the ladder in her case. She had reached the point where she was acknowledging her burnout and that she needed to do something else. And she was about to take some steps back.  She had set aside some time and savings to kind of pull back on what she was doing come the fall of that year.  And she set that space with the intention of job hunting.  Perhaps reconsidering applying for full-time professor jobs out of state. She wasn't sure if she wanted to move away from where she was. But she set that space to search and decide. Right before she was about to transition into that space, a job kind of popped up.  It was a full-time job with an organization she had been contracting with before. So she knew that the organization matched a lot of her personal values and was a good place to work. She knew a lot of people who were already in that organization, not well, but well enough to know that it seemed like a great place to work and it was in arts education. But through the administration side.  So it was something a little different than she had done previously.  But because she had been doing a lot of freelance individual work she had the skills that they were looking for. She also had the practical experience of being on the ground doing the teaching, working as an artist, and having knowledge of both sides of it. So it was kind of an ideal situation that accidentally happened as well. Well, that's actually very interesting, because through your freelance experience, even though you realized that that wasn't a path you wanted to continue down, you still had this introduction to this company and the people there to where you knew what some of the job would look like. I think Dani touched on a couple of things that are really important.  But the one that I want to pull out first is this idea of setting aside space. Because one of the challenges of freelancing that I think anyone who's done it can experience is the fact that it can overtake all day every day. And what tends to get crowded out is this idea of that intentional space setting to think about working on your business or even taking the step back to say, “Is this what I want to be doing?” When your skills are in demand, it is very easy to fill your day with work for clients.  Sometimes I've even seen freelancers who have waiting lists.  They're turning down other clients, because they're so busy. And I think it was very smart that Dani’s first step was not along the lines of firing all her clients today. Nor did she have the mindset of taking whatever job pops up.  She very intentionally said, “I'm going to put some space in here to figure out what this is going to look like because I don't necessarily know what my next step is.” And I feel that it's so hard for a lot of freelancers to do that just because of the way we work.  We tend to be thinking about other people's businesses. Or the projects we're working on.  And not recognizing how it's affecting us. Prior to doing that your step, Dani recognized that she was in, at least, the beginning stages of burnout. I asked her if she could speak a little bit about that to help other freelancers who might not realize that there are some subtle signs popping up that they might be burning out. I asked Dani, “What would you do if you could go back in time and talk to yourself at that period and raise those red flags sooner? Dani thinks, for her, and probably for a lot of people who work in freelance, we go down that path because it's the work that we want to do.  It's the work that we value.  And it's a passion!   It's very hard to be motivated to work for yourself or to take on different clients nad different small side jobs, unless it's something you're passionate about. And so, for her, the early signs of burnout were she was unhappy. And she did not see the same level of passion and commitment to the work that she had when she was beginning. She was very unhappy and very tired. She started to dread having to work. Instead of it feeling like something that was feeding her, it felt like she was just feeding the work.  So she thinks those were the early signs for me. And then actual physical exhaustion was a part of it as well.  Like she mentioned before, she thinks a lot of it, for her, was the lack of very firm boundaries. So if she could go back, she thinks that would be something that she would work on and establish early on. And she thinks with those boundaries, it helps prevent burnout.  But she thinks you're also more likely to catch the burnout before it happens. Yes, I could not agree with you more. I think that boundaries is probably up there with imposter syndrome and and mindset work. But it is one of the most important things that a lot of freelancers don't realize how much they're hurting themselves and their business by not having good boundaries.  Because a lot of us come from employee-employer situations.  Or we're working with companies that don't realize they need to or have to treat freelancers differently. It can feel very much like a power move to put those boundaries down with a client.  But it's very, very important for your own mental health. And I love that Dani acknowledges some of the signs of what that looks like for her. Because there's almost a sense of grief when you start to realize that this thing you built is great, but then it's physically exhausting you.  And you’re not even feeling lit up by it. Yes, it's bringing in money.  And clients are relatively happy, but it's having these other negative impacts on me. So can you talk about this job opportunity that came up? How did you wind down your freelance work?  Did you keep it on but were just different about how you decided what to do with freelance clients? Dani shared that it’s a little bit of both. Like she mentioned before, she had already started taking steps back when this job opportunity arose. So she had already created some space. When she started at this new job, in this new position, she as still honoring the commitments she had already made. And she made it pretty clear when she accepted the position that it was important to her to be able to have the space to honor those commitments and follow through on the things she had already said she was going to do.  Which she doesn’t know why she found it surprising, but she did find it very surprising that the company loved that about her. They told her that's one of the reasons we hired her. She did have a few other teaching gigs lined up, which I followed through and completed.  Luckily for her, within her work, everything was very structured on a calendar and an academic calendar. So she knew when those things would end.  She also knew that because it was work that she was passionate about that she wasn't able to give it up completely. So while she was winding down with those things, she was trying to figure out how much of it she could keep, in addition to a 40 hour a week job. And so through conversations with the college she was contracting with and her new employers, she was able to see how much space she could have.  She’s now in my third year in this position.  And she has continued to do some side contract work and some teaching at the college level while she has been there. So it's continuing to take that step back and see what the space was that allowed it. What she also really liked about it was that she was able to build in more space for other projects that she wanted to do that weren't necessarily completely under the umbrella of what she was doing before. So it was nice to have that security of a full time job, but be able to continue a little bit of the work that she was really passionate about,  It was also nice to be able to create some space for new things. Because she thinks this is true for a lot of creatives and freelancers, we're always wanting to learn new things to improve ourselves to find something that will satisfy us. So she loves that she has that space in my schedule now that she’s able to try new things as well. I understand and that makes a lot of sense. Because when you're doing one particular thing or a couple of different things in your freelance skill set wheelhouse, it's very easy for those to become the most profitable or the ones that are requested the most.  You do them over and over again. But it really can crowd out the opportunity to learn new things or even just pick something up that's a hobby.  I see a lot of people get stuck in this mindset of wondering if something is  going to make them money.  Not everything you do has to make you money, or has to be part of your business. It can be if you want, but you can also just pick up a hobby or follow a thread to see how much you're interested in it.  I think that that's a really common pitfall that people fall into. I asked Dani to walk me through how her process has changed as far as deciding whether or not to take on a freelance project. Now, knowing what she does from having done it before and balancing this full time job and some other projects. She shared that she feels like she has drawn a much stronger line. It used to be where she would pretty much accept anything that she  was remotely interested in. And now knowing that she has much more limited time to accommodate those things, she has to be a lot more intentional. So for her that means she knows that she can only accept one or two things in a given amount of time.  She still thinks very much in the semester schedule.  So she can only take one or two things every semester. And having that knowledge and that line makes her evaluate what it is that she enjoys the most.  Some of the things that she considers are: What age group is it? Is it that I want to work with the most? What are the sorts of things that I want to teach? Or what kind of art do I want to do that would fill me the most in this schedule?  And it's nice because she doesn’t necessarily have to think about long term with her freelance work. Now, she only has to think about what's going to serve her in this amount of time. And she doesn’t have to necessarily worry about building anything or expanding anything. That's a really great point. One challenge that I know a lot of freelancers who are coming out, from the other direction where they have the full time job first and they're just starting to freelance, they always want to know if they need to tell their employer.  Or if they need to tell their freelance clients that they also have a full time job and these are the parameters under which it does or doesn't affect what they are doing for them. I asked Dani if she does that with her clients. Do they know that you have other responsibilities, and you're not going to pick up the phone at 10 o'clock in the morning if they call out of the blue? Or is that something you just deal with on a different or case by case basis? Dani shared that she thinks it's a case by case.  She has had semesters where she was very upfront with not only the college she was working with, or the people she was contracting with, but also with the students who she was teaching about her schedule. This is her life.  And this is when she’s available and when she’s not available. She’s also had times where she doesn’t do that.  The other thing she finds that it doesn't make a huge difference is what she communicates to other people, it's really kind of drawing the line for herself.  That makes the bigger difference. So she thinks in both cases the outcome was about the same. She feels as though she has moved into more of not necessarily having to disclose just because she doesn't understand necessarily what she was getting out of disclosing.  She doesn’t know if she was looking for people to understand that boundary, but she feels like you can establish that boundary without having to justify why. That's a really good point because a lot of times there's not a ton of overlap unless the person from your freelance gig is trying to push into your other time when you're not available or need to be focused on something, I really found that a lot of times when I was working full time that it just didn’t really affect it. And I didn't see how it affected my boss at all. I didn't see how it affected my freelance clients either.   We could either do a call at noon when I was on a lunch break or after hours.  We could even just discuss it over email. So I agree with you that it's a case by case thing. I don't think you owe it to anyone unless there's going to be some potential where they're like, “Oh, we need you to be available at 3 pm every Tuesday.”  That’s when you have to tell them that you might not be the person for them because you’re working at that time. But I agree that I think a lot of times it's about our own boundaries.  You have to ask yourself, “Okay, how am I going to have firm boundaries with both these things so that I don't get overwhelmed or don't shortchange anyone in the process?” Well, this has been super helpful, for me at least, to hear how you've made this transition and really arrived at a balance of things that work best for you. I think that's important for everyone listening to remember that you don't have to apply a formula from anyone and try to force that into fitting into your life.  You get to decide to what extent you're freelancing or you're not or you have a full time job or you work remotely or you're volunteering.  So you get to decide what that looks like. And you can always change it too.  If it's no longer suiting you, for any reason, you can always adapt and change it. So never feel like you're a prisoner to your circumstances.  Because you always have the power to adapt. And that's something I think we've talked about a lot in this episode is tuning into those signals in yourself know this isn't working. How do I make that decision? How do I wind things down and move forward in a step that's positive? I asked Dani where people could go to learn more about her and all of the great work she’s doing including her podcast. The best place to learn about her is through her podcast, which is one of those lovely things that has been able to rise because I've had that extra space in my life and is able to fulfill me in a different way. So, she co hosts and produces a podcast called Biracial Unicorns. They're available on all the podcasting platforms. Website: biracialunicornspodcast.co Instagram: @biracialunicorns Facebook: Biracial Unicorns Twitter: @biracialmagic This was such a great episode full of useful information.  For more freelance advice, get a copy of my book Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business—available now! Buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and more.

James:  Hi, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast. Today, I have Glen Gonzalez who have been a big operator out of you know, Austin, Texas, and Glenn has deals which he has done in Dallas area, Corpus Christi Clean and south of Houston City, called Lake Jackson. And he is currently owning about 3,000 units at some point, in the past few years, he owned like more than. 4,500 units and he also have a strong property management company, previously, which used to manage up to 6,500 units. So he brings really good value to this podcast. Hey Glenn, how are you doing? Glenn: Hey, James, doing great. Thanks for having me on, this is exciting.  James: Yeah. Yeah. Did I miss out any of the story behind you that you want to clarify? Glenn: Maybe. I think where I came from, you know, because people are always interested. You know, we talk about all the success that we have, but I actually started as a maintenance man. James: Wow.  Glenn: I was kind of at the bottom of the barrel, picking up trash and I was like a porter, really. And then I was eventually painting apartments and fixing stoves and stuff. So my involvement in the apartment industry started about 30 years ago. So I actually came through as a maintenance man, leasing agent, property manager, then a regional manager, director of operations and so all the way through. Pretty much all the different ranks of Property Management until about six years ago, when I started buying my own, as the owner. And that really changes the perspective on apartments, you know, you got an operator perspective and an owner perspective, so maybe I could share some of that today while we're all on the call.  James: Sure. That would be really, really interesting. I mean some of the big guys that I know in this apartment, such as Ken McElroy. I mean, he started as a property manager, right? And I interviewed Eddy Lauren who has done like more like 1 billion in transactions as an operator. One of the big first advice that he told our listeners when I interviewed him like a few podcasts back was like, start from the ground, start to learn from the ground itself. Be property manager or be a maintenance man or porter and then learned in the business because you can learn so many things. So it looks like you have that 'coming from the ground' experience. Now, you have no more than 3,000 units and you used to have 4,500 units, which is awesome. I mean looking at from the ground itself up to the asset management; like when you were maintenance man or a porter, what did you think about the owners? Glenn: Oh my gosh, I used to get so nervous when the owners would show up to one of my apartment complexes because my boss would call me and say, hey, the owners are coming so I want to make sure this place looks perfect and everything is in order. And then they would tell me things like, you know, if they ask you a bunch of questions, you know, they would say let me do the talking. So I was basically supposed to keep my mouth shut and that just kind of made me nervous, you know, because of all the hype and stuff.  So I don't know, you kind of think the owners are almost not like real people to some degree, but they are, they're just like you and me. They're just common folks.   James: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean sometimes, especially the maintenance crew, right? I mean usually when owners come into a property, when we go and visit our property - I mean, most of the owners, we talk to the office staff, right? Because we think we control the whole thing but the backbone of renewal in the property is the maintenance. Because people are happy when work orders are being taken care of and people really like that. So we really make it a point to really take care of the maintenance people and that's another advice for all the listeners out there. If you own property, don't just look at the property managers or the leasing agents or the assistant managers; go and say hi to your maintenance people because they are really, really important. Don't you think so? Glenn: Absolutely. I would add a little bit to that. You know, when I go visit a property, I always speak with the maintenance guys, always because they will tell you everything that's going on on that property, even the stuff the manager might not know. I mean, they know how often they're recharging air conditioners or how often they're fixing things. I mean, they know the work orders like the back of their hand, but beyond that, they even know the tenants. I mean they know which ones have pets and which ones don't have pets because they're in there, doing work orders. They know everything. And I would say that they're often the ones that are neglected because like you mentioned earlier, when we go and do a site visit, a lot of times we'll sit down with the property manager and we'll talk about the lessee and the marketing and the delinquency and some of those common things but rarely do we talk to the maintenance guy about, hey, is there anybody out here that's like a bad apple, that's like creating a lot of havoc? And they will tell you who's dumping the trash out there. They will tell you who are having parties late at night and whose got like 5 dogs in their apartment. You know, I mean, they know everything. So my advice is if you need to know what's really going on behind the scenes, get to know your maintenance guys. James: Yeah. I think it's also important during the due diligence process right? Because sometimes we are with the Brokers and we have the managers and you can see that they like to hide the people who know the real stuff which is the maintenance guys, right? So try to get to them to ask more questions. Did you have any tips and tricks to get to maintenance guys while doing due diligence so that we can get the truth from them?  Glenn: Yeah. Yeah. I think part of it is just making them feel appreciated and that their opinion matters, I'll tell you this just like I was sharing my experience. I used to get really nervous when the owners would come around because to me, when I was younger, they were very intimidating. So if one of those guys came up and wanted to talk to me, I'd be like, um, you're talking to me? So find a way to make them comfortable, you know, really, at the end of the day, just make them feel appreciated for all their hard work and acknowledge that they are such a big part of the team. And when they feel appreciated and they feel acknowledged, trust me, they'll share with you a lot of important information.  They may offer information that nobody else knows. They may say things like, hey, by the way, I would go check the roofs on building 3 because we had several roof leaks on that one building in the last four months. They know everything because they're doing all the sheetrock repairs on the inside, right? And so they even know where it's leaking. It could be around the chimney or something in there. Just be like, good idea, thanks. I will check that. So yeah, due diligence, maintenance guys, you're absolutely right. James: The other thing that we do, just to share with the listeners is you know, we also ask the maintenance guys to rank the property managers. So it's not only like property managers control the whole thing, I think six months, once a year, we do this 360 feedback on the property managers from the maintenance right? Because you know, sometimes you need to give them the voice, right? And I think we have to just give them an official channel for them to voice what they want to share in terms of how the property managers are doing,  what these people are doing. Glenn: You know and I've shared this with some of my friends in the industry that you'll never ever have a successful manager without a successful maintenance guy and vice versa. If one of them are really good at their job and the other one is not, you will not be maximizing the value of that apartment complex. I mean, it's almost like a marriage, you know, the manager and the maintenance supervisor, they're married at the hip. They've got to be on the same page and if they're not, if they're complaining about each other, you know, that's an opportunity to stop and pause about why they're not on the same page. So just FYI, you know, and if one of the maintenance guys like you said gives a rating to the manager of a very low number like, oh, that manager is a 2 at the best, you might want to go talk to the manager.  Like how do you rate your maintenance guy? He's like a negative 2 at best, you know, and it's like, what's going on and who knows what the problem is? Before you could then read the financials. The financials will tell you the story too because if your way out of budget, you know, say the maintenance guy is not very good at painting so he wants to contract out every paint and your turned cost could be very, very expensive. There's a lot of you know things that you can learn from each other. That's why it's on your part.  James: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, how did you climb that ladder from porter to maintenance to becoming an owner? Glenn: It's a funny story, James, it's really funny story. To be honest with you, I'm out there trying to do work orders and I started my industry in Salt Lake City and it's really cold outside. So when you're picking up trash, you're freezing cold, especially when you're going from apartment to apartment, carrying all this stuff. Anyway, so I went and I told my boss, you know, I don't want to be a maintenance guy forever. I want to be a manager because they get to sit in the office and talk on the phone. That was my motivation, I was young. I just don't want to be out in the cold. So they're like well, we don't have any openings for maintenance guys to be managers. I'm like well just so you know, that's my next step.  So they had a 60 unit apartment complex that needed a part-time manager and a part-time maintenance guy so I said I'll take it. So I was part-time on each one of those so I got to learn the manager skill and you know talk on the phone and then I needed the work orders and make ready and I learned with this valuable lesson. Somebody moved in and they had to fill out one of those move-in checklists to make sure that the units in proper condition when people move in and they turned it into the manager after they signed the lease and it's got all these things that don't work. The stove doesn't work right, the toilet is running and the dishwasher won't cycle or whatever. So that I got to know who fixed this apartment, you need to get them back. So I'd go back later in the day and I would take my tools and change my clothes and they're like, hey, what are you doing here? I'm like, well, I'm the maintenance guy. And they're like, oh, so you're the one that got this apartment ready? I'm like, yeah, that was me. And I realized then I was not a very good maintenance guy, but that was my transition.  But I really was able to turn that apartment community around. And the problem with occupancy and revenue and it got to the point where it was doing very, very well because I kind of was able to see it from both sides. I knew how much we can rent them for but I also knew we had to get them ready first and I work my little magic as a newbie to the industry. I was very successful.  My boss recognized the success and they had another, I think, it was larger, I don't remember exactly, 200 or 300 units. It was struggling with some of the same stuff and they asked if I would go there and give him my opinion. So I went, kind of as a manager, over to this other community and found that the leasing agent and the manager were really good friends but that leasing agent wasn't very effective at all and the manager was too good of friends to fire her friend.  So I said, well, let's do one of those secret shops and do an evaluation and kind of did all that and I showed the manager. Look, you know, you're not a very good manager because you're not able to make a business decision. You've got to make changes on the leasing and that leasing agent is affecting you as a leader. So she kind of said she realized at that time that if she wasn't able to make an improvement or change it was going to stifle her own career as well. So she made that change and all the sudden, the leasing got better and collections got better and people were giving better reviews and my boss recognized that I had this knack for identifying problems. Well, then I got to oversee multiple apartment complexes and I became what's known as an area manager so I had two or three that I could oversee. So my career just started kind of progressing a little bit. I graduated college and I was supposed to be a hospital administrator and I did my internship at a hospital and I did not want to do that the rest of my life. So here I was at a crossroads, maintenance manager/hospital administrator, now what?  So I said, I'm just going to make Property Management my career. And then I just started getting more educated with real estate licensing, then I eventually got my CPM designation and I was involved with the apartment association stuff. So there you go. That's kind of how I moved up the ladder a little bit. James: So at what point did you buy your first property? I mean, syndicated or you know, start using some other.. Glenn:  Sure that's a great question. So in the time frame from that point, it was probably another, gosh, 10 or 15 years later. I was now working for a big REIT, a Real Estate Investment Trust, in the Pacific Northwest. Equity Residential, they're very big property owner-manager REIT and I was getting great experience there. Well, I had a mentor that was serving on the board of directors for the apartment association, his name is John Gibson, also from Washington. And I went to John and said John I want to buy an apartment complex one day. And I showed him this little 60 unit deal that I was analyzing. And at this time I was still a regional manager. I still got a W-2 paycheck. When I went to John and I said, "You know, tell me what you think."  And he said, "You know, you'll probably do okay."  He said, "But I have this little 44 unit apartment complex, I'll sell you and I'll make it much easier to buy."  I said, "How so?"  He's like, "You just need to come up with a $150,000 down payment and I'll carry a note back for the rest."  And I said, "Great. Let me go look at it."  So I went and looked at it and this guy wasn't managing it very well and I knew how to manage pretty well so I'm like, 'This is great, we can make money on this."  So I went to two of my friends and I said, "You guys want to go in on this apartment complex with me?"  They said, "What do we need?" I said, "$150,000."  And they said, "You know, what are the splits?"  I said, "A third, a third, a third."  And they said, "Okay."  I said, "But you each have to put up $75,000."  And they're like, "Whoa, well, for a third, a third, a third, shouldn't we split that 150,000, a third, a third, a third?" But I didn't have any money. So I'm like, "I found the deal if we're gonna make money and you guys put up the equity, you guys will get your money back before me but once we start making money, we'll split a third, a third, a third."  And those two friends said, "All right, sounds good."  We did it. We bought that apartment complex. He carried a note back and we own it for like a year and a half and we sold it for about a million dollars more than we paid for it in eight months. So that third, a third, a third, those folks were pretty happy. So the mistake I made is when I sold it, I carried back a note on part of our profits and the guy that borrowed or bought it from us has defaulted on that note. So, actually, we made a lot of money on paper, I lost half of it to a bad note. So word to the wise if you're going to be a lender to a buyer, do your homework.  James: So you seller-financed to someone else, I guess. Glenn: Yes. We still pocketed a half million dollars. So I mean we did okay, but we carried a note back. That was my very first deal, it was 44 units and it was while I was still working as an employee. James: That's very interesting because you really came from the ground up and you made that transition to a owner, you know, and you found the deal and you able to convince your friends to finance it. So at what point did you had the realization that, hey, I'm a regional now, I want to buy and why did you want that thought process came in? Why did you want to be an owner?  Glenn: Well, a couple of reasons. One, I knew that these owners that came seemed like they had a lot of money, in my mind. I assume that they were pretty rich people. They drove fancy cars and stuff and from my perspective they were wealthy. But the other one is I realized that when I got really good at property management and I increased the value of that apartment community, that owner would eventually sell that property and he would take his money and run and I would get a thank you and he would get a lot of money. And they always said, "You know, Glenn we really appreciate your property management efforts. You've done very well for us and thank you very much."  So I got a lot of thank yous, not a lot of dollars and you know, that was a motivation for me. It's like someday I wish I could trade that value for myself. My wife always encouraged me. She's like, "You know, you're really good at making other people a lot of money. Someday, you got to do that for yourself." And so that was motivation too. You get really good at Property Management, you should maybe be the owner but I didn't have any money.   James: But you have that knowledge on how to increase the NOI, which is the most important, I would say. Having a lot of money and buying assets if you do not know how to increase the NOI from the ground up, you're maybe just half-blindfolded.   Glenn: Yeah, and I think you know what made me successful later in life, is that experience and the knowledge that I had from the ground up. It gave me great insight in helping me find good deals that I could fix if they're broken. And then, later in my career about six years ago, I started to buy my own. And I remember having to raise over a million dollars on my first deal and when people realize that you have experience, you know what you're talking about and you came from the ground up, they're more likely to invest with you than they would be with somebody who has no experience,19:48inaudible]  just go syndicate deal with no experience. So, the experience really paid off in the end for me.  James: Yeah, I'm sure it's paying off right now itself. So I want to go into some of the secrets in Property Management because you are the insider. Glenn: Yeah, that's right. James: Because I mean, for me, my wife does a lot of property management and just because of the knowledge that we have in asking questions to our employees and all the employes doesn't really tell us stories. They don't tell us like it takes five days to make ready or two to three weeks to make ready and all that kind of thing. I mean, property management is a people business, there's a lot of detailed things happening inside the property management itself. And if you do not know the details, people are just going to take you for a ride. So, let's go into the details. So how would you know a leasing agent is not a good leasing agent.   Glenn: So great question, James. There are indicators that are quite obvious, but then there's some that you kind of have to peel the onion back a little bit to figure out. The first indicator is if your occupancy is struggling, where all your competitors are saying, in the 90s and your property is like in the 80s and you have enough product that's already made ready, and it's priced correctly, but gosh, people are just not leasing so that could be an indicator.  You know, there are remedies to that. You can hire a secret shopper that will come and pretend to be a renter and they will give that leasing agent an evaluation.  James: And what does the secret shopper do? Glenn: They pretend like they are an average person coming to rent an apartment. You know, they give a name, they go on a tour and they kind of evaluate whether or not the leasing agent was able to connect with them as a renter if they took them on a tour of the apartment. Mostly if they followed up to say, "You know, are you still interested in renting?" You know, some leasing agents never follow up. Some agents aren't able to connect with people like emotionally connect with people because you know renting an apartment home it's an emotional decision. There's apartments everywhere. So the only thing that makes your apartment may be different than your competitors' apartment, maybe that leasing agent.  So if the indicators are there, there are remedies but sometimes you just got to peel the onion back and what I mean by that is you just need to listen to how they talk to people. You need to get feedback from the residents. As an owner, you can always send out a little flyer or a little questionnaire. You know, we get what's called the Move-in Report, where it talks about who moved in, in the last 30 days. I look at those moving reports to see if they've hit the targets on the rent and stuff, but you can send a little questionnaire or you could even call them on the phone, as the owner, and say, "Tell me about your experience from the time you moved in till now." And that'll give you a lot of insight.  The other thing is the closing ratio. There are averages in our industry about if 10 people apply, what percent actually come back and sign a lease and move in? And that percentage could be anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the people come back. Now, granted some of those get denied because of credit, criminal activity or addictions and we expect that. But if some leasing agent has a closing ratio of 10% or 15%, you'll want to stop and say there's a problem here because that's below the industry average. And where do you find those industry average? Well, you got to talk to people in the industry. They're not widely publicized on closing ratios but that information is readily available. You can get it through the apartment association. You can get it through people who own and operate apartments and you can just ask, network with people.  James: Yeah, and what do you do if the leasing agent gives reason saying that our apartment is priced too high? Glenn: Well, there's your 'trust but verify'; she could be right, you know, I mean if they have a low closing ratio and you as the owner said, "Hey, we renovated this unit and I know we can get a thousand dollars for these two bedroom units." And all your competitors and your leasing agent saying, "Yeah, but all my competitors are at 950 to 900 and you want 1000." If you argue with the leasing agent say, "But I spent so much money and I need to get a thousand out of this deal." You know, she's going to get frustrated and so are you. But if I were you, I'd go verify that. If the leasing agent is saying all your competitors are renting their two bedrooms at 950 and she's right, you as the owner better eat some humble pie and take her word for it. And when you get the facts verified, you better adjust your price because you may lose a good leasing agent because you're a bad owner.  James: Correct. Yeah, so it's important that because sometimes as owners. We might hear a certain performer on rents and that may not be true because you are doing it pre-closing, you know. Only when the rubber meets the road then you really know whether whatever you projected in your performer is being able to be captured on the ground. All right, and it's very skill to identify [25:41crosstalk and unintelligible]  Glenn:  That's correct. I had a boss of mine one time, he was the CEO of a company and he said this to me one time. He said, "You know if it comes down to your opinion versus my opinion, my opinion wins because I'm the owner."   He says, "But if it comes down to my opinion versus your facts and your facts are right, it doesn't really matter what my opinion is, the facts always tell the truth." That's why we do Market surveys. That's why we figure out where competitors occupancy is. And if you're a good owner, you'll realize that sometimes the information is right in front of your face talking to you and you're just not willing to listen.  James: Correct. There's a lot of data that we can use to really see whether I priced it correctly or not. Such as, how many people are applying, how many vacancies you had for that certain configuration and all that, right? Glenn: Yeah. Yeah. James: And how do you select a good property manager?  Glenn: That's a tough one. That's a really tough one. Gosh, you know I have, in my career, when I was an asset manager for Pacific property company and I think we had like 8,000 units and we had hired two or three different property management companies that did fee management for us as an owner and I was an asset manager. But some of those were some big name brand management companies that had all the bells and whistles but you know what it came down to James? It came down to two individuals, how well did that regional manager get along with that property manager and how often is that regional giving support?              If they are pretty well connected and they're good communicators, chances are all the other things will fall into place. The bills get paid on time and you know, if the manager needs some overrides or permission to the regional and they're on the same page and readily available, that property will flow better. Sometimes I've seen that a regional manager may have 9 10 11 or even 12 Assets in their portfolio. How often can an effective Regional go visit 12 Assets in a week or a month or two months? Not very often. They're going to be spread so thin.             The trick is that I know a lot of fee management companies are moving away from this but their profitability increases because they get a management fee increases when they have one fixed cost of a regional manager spread out over many assets. So from the property managers company's perspective, they may give that Regional a big portfolio to cover their salary. You, as the owner, want that portfolio to be small because you want their undivided attention, you know, so that's a good question you can ask a management company. Is how many assets are in that regional manager's portfolio and how often that manager works with your property manager on site. Those are two key elements.  And of course, the other big one is the back office. How often are they producing your financial packages and are they reconciling every month and do they catch the bounced checks fast enough? The back office, people don't really jump into as an owner, they just look at what's presented to them on the front end. So there's lots of good bells and whistles.  James: Very interesting. So what is the good ratio for regional versus property that they manage? Glenn: Yeah. That's a great question. I think an effective regional manager shouldn't have more than seven or eight assets in their portfolio. That number can go up to 9 or 10 if all those properties are maybe smaller or they've got one manager that oversees two or three that helps or they're all stabilized. They are all stabilized in their the assets and they're all doing very well with the regional, then they could then handle more.             But if the regional manager has a new lease up or repositioning or undergoing a renovation or you're trying to change the demographic a little bit, those are very, very time-consuming. And if that's the case, you don't want them to have more than five in their portfolio.  So there's a big range. Variables are stabilized in the size and then the complexity of the assets that are in the portfolio. James: Yeah, yeah, that's a very interesting feedback on the regional because as you know, and I know is that property management is a business of issues, daily issues which a lot of asset managers don't want to touch. They say that is a thankless job, we do not want to touch it and all that. But how important do you think Property Management, in terms of the efficiency or the NOI optimization of a multi-family? Glenn: Again, it comes down to that regional manager and the property manager. You know, I guess the fixed costs are you know, some property managers charge you more, a larger percentage of the management fee. That's a cost that's going to affect your NOI. The property management company has to have some buying power. Hopefully, they buy so many carpets and so much paint that they get significant discounts on the product that they purchase and they pass that right along to you as the owner, that would be a great benefit.  You know, if you're paying, call it $10 a yard for carpet installed and the property management company can get it done for eight or nine, that's pretty significant overall your Capex. So all those are little variables that you need to kind of ask what kind of benefit you get as the owner. And some of them are the opposite. They're very expensive, some of them pay for very expensive software for the property management and they pass it right along to you the owner and you're, "Gosh, this is expensive every month." And then you start asking about this fee and that fee and there's like an accounting fee on top of the property management fee. They charge you a fee for processing your own payroll and like, "Why am I paying you to process my payroll? Isn't that part of the services?"  And they're like, "Oh, no that's an extra."  So, you know, gosh darn, you just got to dive into it, to be honest with you. That's a good question. It's really complicated. Call me and we'll talk offline. James: Yeah. That's good. Glenn: I used to be a property management company,[32:56crosstalk] and I know there are areas that the management company wants to make money on. James: Correct. Correct.  Glenn: It doesn't always benefit the owner. It benefits the management company. James: Yes, but I mean we have to understand property management is also a lot of work and they are the backbone of your operation. So choosing the right property management and how the profit centers and all that is how everybody... Glenn: Yeah. James if you step back and you realize sometimes it's worth paying those little fees to these property management companies if they're really good at what they do. Because if you step back, they're really good at what they do, they're going to make you Millions on your asset. if they're not very good at what they do, they're going to lose you Millions on your asset. And here's the key; sometimes they just make excuses on why they're poor performers. And I struggled with a very large management company at 30,000 units. I owned a 650 unit apartment complex up in Dallas and my occupancy was going down and down and down and the bad debt was going up and up and up and I'm like, "What the world is going on here?"  And they said, "Well, the market, the sub-market is getting worse."  And I scratch my head and I said, "Well, how could that be? Because our competitors are 94 and you're like 81."  They're like, "Well, that's because they have just filled it up with junk people."  And I'm like, "I talked to the owner of that one and they said their delinquencies are only like two and a half percent. You guys are like seven. I mean that doesn't an add up either."  So what's really going on and they were a mess. They were going through changes up above and they had two Regionals that quit because of leadership and the property manager had quit because she didn't like the management company and my 650 unit was struggling financially now after it had just had its best year. Her name was Letty, she was the property manager for us for a year year and a half. When Letty left, everything unraveled and I ended up having to terminate that management contract and I gave it to a different management company and they were very successful. And they turned it all around and I ended up selling that complex about a year and a half after the new property management took over. And guess what? They out-performed all of a sudden and it was the same submarket, it was the same community. So all the excuses the previous management company gave me was just a bunch of BS.  James: Yeah. Yeah. It takes a lot of leadership to really fire property management because as an asset manager who just know asset management your hands are tied. You can listen to one excuse this month and next month, I'm going to give you the same excuses. But at what point do you make that call saying that, okay, these guys are not good? So it's very hard for you to make that call if you do not know the details and how to read the financials; as you say, you know the owner on the comps, right? Glenn: Yeah. James: But not everybody knows the owners. So, how do they find out? It could be very well true that if [36:07inaudible] so do you have some tips on how to identify bad property management? One point should be fine.  Glenn: I know a couple of them by name.  James: We don't need names.  Glenn: I can't say it on the podcast; call me. How do you identify? Here's one indicator. There's a lot of turnover for some key people. You know if the bookkeepers are quitting and the regional managers are quitting and the property managers are quitting; if you can't have access to interview all those people and talk to them about why they're quitting, you're losing out on an opportunity, but that will tell you, that's an indicator. By nature, I think we turn over about 30 percent of the site people a year, you know. One of the indicators that I chart so if you're up to 40 50 percent of your site people move, including your maintenance guys and releasing agent, but if you're up above 30%, there's a problem. Either with the leadership or how it functions or they just can't get enough training. There's something going on because people don't just walk away from their jobs. And the way to indicate a good one, management company, is if they've got long-term employees that stay with them long term over and over and over again. So there are some indicators there.  And your intuition; let me just address that. If for some reason a property management company is telling you excuses over and over and over again and in your mind, it doesn't add up but your guts telling you something's not right here, I would say trust your intuition because there's probably something not right there. James: Got it. Got it. Let's go back to, as you said, the most important person in the whole pipeline for an owner, asset manager. So you have leasing agent, you have property manager, you have Regional and you have the property management leadership. So you said, if I remember correctly, Regional is the most important on how they communicate and... Glenn: The regional and the property manager those two together.  James: So how do you identify the qualities of a good regional?  Glenn: Yeah, you know the good regionals, you can always tell if they're pretty effective because you can ask them a question about, you know, call it turnover expenses or you know, we notice this big expense for HVAC, you know that Regional says, "You know what? I noticed that too because the manager had booked it up in the operating expenses and I reclassify it to Capex."  And if the regional knows what's going on, how the property is spending their money and where they're booking it and she just knows it or he knows it right off the bat, they're on it, and they are on it and you should be very grateful that they're watching your asset and your financials pretty effectively.  Now if you ask a regional manager, 'Hey, what's going on? Why did it go up?"  And she's like, "I've no idea. Let me get back with you."  And you're like, "okay, get back to me, let’s talk. " And she never he never gets back with you and you send them another email says, "You know, what did you find out? I mean, our NOI took a dip 10 grand this month and it's been pretty consistent, what's going on?"  If you have to follow more than one or two times, dude, you've got a problem. They're not looking at your bottom line. They're not talking to their manager and they're certainly not watching your asset.  James: Got it. Got it. Okay. It's very interesting. Let's go to a bit more personal side. Is there any moment in your whole career when you started in real estate up to now, is there a proud moment that you always remember, you're going to remember that proud moment for your whole life? Glenn: That's a good question. You should have given me some lead time on that. James: I'm really proud that I did that. It could be anything.  Glenn: You know, I think part of it is a feeling of satisfaction that I get. You know when we syndicated deals, when we bring investors together, when we take that money that they've trusted us with and we apply it to the apartment complex and we do what we said we were going to do. We renovate the office and we raise the rents. And then, down the road, you step back and you look at the community and I go, "Wow! This actually looks better than it did when we buy it." And then it feels better and our delinquencies are going down. It's almost like your baby. It's like your kid, your little offspring. Like I'm so proud of this community.  And then you sell that and you give all the investors back their money and they call you on the phone, "Glenn, dude, I'm so happy. You actually did what you said you were gonna do and did better than we expected." To be honest with you, I get so much satisfaction out of that and I like making other people money, you know. And when that happens, they don't mind sharing the profits with me. And now, I'm making money so it's not always about the money, but it's about doing what you said you were going to do and doing it well and kind of being the best in the industry. Not all deals have gone has planned, not all deals have been successful and those are tough pills to swallow but I think, for the most part, my greatest in my career is seeing the magic that we work and executing the plan, I love that. And then there is one other if you don't mind me sharing? James: Sure, absolutely. Glenn: There's a gentleman that was a maintenance guy that would come and talk about if you spend this, you know, I think we need more rent. If you fix this over here and you know, I mean really, I wouldn't do anything on the one bedrooms because we have so many of them we can't even random, you know, but we can make a lot more than that. I took that maintenance guy and I said, "Have you ever thought about being a property manager?" He's like, "No way, there's no way; that's the last job I want."  I'm like, "But you think like a property manager."  And this is just a deal here at Austin that I was managing as a fee manager and I convinced him; I said, "Dude, you could do this."             And he did. He got out of his comfort zone and we moved him from outside to inside and he was the same way. He was so effective, I love the way he processed. And his name is Louis and Louis was a very good manager. He had a wife and a child and he was later moonlighting for a company for Best Buy, you know, he was working in the evenings and on weekends and stuff to make ends meet for his family. And we were at lunch one time, talking and I saw what he had done for the community. The occupancy went up, it had stabilized and he was right. We were making more money on the two bedrooms and I told Louis, I said, "Louis, why don't you quit? How much are you making at Best Buy a month?"  He said, "I get an extra eight or nine hundred dollars a month by working kind of part-time, on the weekends." And I said, "If you were able to just devote more time to the community, do you think you can make it more money?" He said, "I just can't afford to not."  So I told him, I said, "Let me raise your pay by a thousand dollars a month if you quit that job."   And I said, "Then, you could be a better husband. You could be a better father to your kid and you won't be so stressed. You don't have to work every single weekend because you're going to get burned out, you're going to get sick and then you're eventually going to quit."  And he's a grown man, he just started crying. Right there at lunch, it was kind of uncomfortable. He's like, "Why would you do that for me?"  I said, "Because I see in you great things, Louis."  And I said, "You should be a better dad and a better father to your child. If you're gone all the time, you're going to look back and you're going to say it wasn't worth it."  So the community had benefited so much from this guy, it could afford to give him a $12,000 a year raise and it would have zero effect on the properties bottom line because he had increased in a while. And he stood up with tears in his eyes and he's like, "I'm gonna go give notice."  I said, "And I'm gonna raise your pay this afternoon." And he gave me a big hug, and we've been friends ever since. He's very successful. But that was a proud moment where I identified that it's not always just about the money. It's also about being a good dad, a good husband and have less stress in your life. And sometimes we could take real estate and make dreams happen for people. Now, that was a good moment in my life. You know, it wasn't that long ago.  James: It's very fulfilling when you impact people's life. I mean you can make money in many ways. Glenn: That's right. James: You make a few million dollars and then you forget about it and you give it to investors and you forget about it. But when you impact someone it follows you throughout your life and you remember that's a big impact, you can't really put a monetary value. Glenn: Yeah. James:  And I've had REIT investors who when I paid them back through refi, they were like happy, "Oh, okay. I really needed this money and you gave it to me." It was just like a mind-blowing thing to me because I didn't really think that they really need that money. I mean, some people just invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and we give, you know, a hundred thousand back to them. They are like, "Wow! It's like I needed this money and you gave it to me. I'm so happy." So yeah, it's very fulfilling. Glenn: Fulfilling, yeah. That's neat. Yeah.  James: So do you have any secret sauce for your success? Glenn: Do the right thing, in the right place at the right time, little bit of luck. I do a lot of praying, help from above and just do the right thing. You know, I mean, I've gone through business relationship changes with business partners because we're not always aligned with doing the right thing and I say if you really want to be successful, just always do the right thing and what comes around goes around. James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that I want to share with the audience is that I know about you and another buyer which is part of our same masterminds when you had details of that property which had a chiller system when it was down like one or two weeks before closing. And you had a choice whether you want to disclose it to the buyer or not and you made the choice of disclosing it, which is I think it's absolutely, the right thing to do. [47:15unintelligible]  Glenn: Not only did I disclose it, James, I also bought the buyer a new Chiller.  James: Absolutely. Glenn: He was already passed his due diligence, he was closing on it. He couldn't come back and re-trade me, his earnest money was more than a chiller so I could have just said it is what it is. I could have put a bandaid on it. But this is a small world we live in. And I've had business partners that have said, "Well, actually you don't have to tell them that kind of stuff." And inside my heart, I think I do. So I bought the guy a new chiller and he heard about that and he picked up the phone and he called me directly.  A lot of times the buyers and the sellers don't always talk to each other because they have brokers that represent them and then they have attorneys that work stuff out. But he called me on the phone. He's like, "I just want to say, thank you."  And I said, "You're welcome."  And I said, "You know, it's a small world and I know how I would feel if the roles were reversed."  And I was buying an apartment complex and I got stuck with a pretty big bill and somebody had knowledge of it because that actually happened to me. I bought Oaks Creek up in Dallas, a 280 unit deal and after due diligence and even after you know, we should have caught it but we didn't, there was a couple of buildings that had questionable foundation issues and my Engineers didn't catch me with my contractors.  Later I found out that the owner knew about it, the seller and I said, "Why didn't you tell me I could have just budgeted for it and fix it? Now, I've got to figure out how to scramble to pay for it because it's not on my rehab budget." He said, "Gosh, I just didn't feel like it was you know, I didn't want to tell you because I don't want you to re-trade me."  I'm like, "Yeah, I wouldn't have re-traded you. I just wish you'd have told me because I could have raised a little extra money to fix it." Anyway, just what comes around goes around. Secret Sauce, do the right thing. You also have to analyze your numbers. With 30 years of experience, when I come across deals today, I will jump in and I will verify rents, I'll verify rehab, I'll look at how we're going to finance it and some sponsors like me or you, we don't do this but some people do and they just convince themselves that it's still a good deal even though the numbers don't say so or like, "Oh, my guts telling me that we're gonna make a ton of money." "Uuuh, I don't know, man. The comps suggest that you're not."  And like, "Well, the taxes aren't really going to go up that high." I'm like, "Yeah, it's going to go up pretty [49:54inaudible]  and so the insurance."  So people convince themselves that you know, not to listen to reality. Well, Secret Sauce, listen to reality, be honest with yourself. Listen, the numbers don't lie. You might lie to yourself but the numbers aren't gonna lie to you if you do your homework.  James: It's so hard nowadays, I think for newbies, especially, who want to get started. I mean, they've been looking for deals for many, many months, sometimes years and they feel so frustrated because the market is good and everybody's a champion. A bull market, everybody's making money. Like I need to get jumping in to buy something. And even though they find the numbers are not really strong, I mean, you have to make a lot of aggressive assumptions. And then, they just go ahead and do it. It's very hard for them. I can understand that but it is what it is. I mean, real estate is not forgiving in a downturn.  We have been in an upturn for the past nine years and a lot of mistakes has been [50:52inaudible] Glenn: Well, here's a little Golden Nugget for our current environment. So interest rates are down. I believe they were kind of reaching the top. Everybody talks about that. Well, one way to mitigate your risk is when you buy a deal in today's market and here's what I'm doing is I actually raise extra money for my investors for a rainy day fund. It's not applied to anything whatsoever. It's just going to sit in the checking account as an emergency. Well, you know, you kind of have to pay some preferred return sometimes or a return to investors for all that extra money, but I'm doing that in my own personal acquisitions just so that I don't ever have to go back into a cash call to an investor and I know things will come up that I can't foresee and the market is gonna take a couple bumps. Well, I'm preparing for that now so, FYI. James: Got it. Very good tips over there. What is the advice for newbies who want to be like you? Glenn: Yeah. Be better than me. I think it's important for people that want to get in the industry to actually latch on and become friends with and partner with somebody that's done it before. It doesn't mean you have to form a company together and you don't have to be long-term, but at least do one deal with somebody who's done it over and over again. You're going to learn so much just by having a mentor friend on one transaction. And once you've been through a full cycle or something with somebody holding your hand and don't be afraid about giving up some of your money to that person or the profits, you know, you will get much more out of the education and the experience and then you can go do it on your own without those people after you've done it once or twice.  Some people like to just jump in and say I can do this. That's my advice, I would do that. James: Got it. Got it. This is a very exciting and inspiring advice. Let me go to one last question before I let you go, Glen. Why do you do what you are doing on a daily basis?  Glenn: Oh, man. It doesn't feel like work James. I kind of work and I look the deals and I just love it. I mean, it doesn't feel like work and I could have been a hospital administrator that feel like work. I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. For some reason, I'm just attracted to this and I get to pick and choose who I do business with. I get to can pick and choose which brokers I like to do business with. I get to put together a team of people that I like to do business with. Not just people in the office but partners that I do business with; investors, lenders, I get to pick all that and you can do business with whoever you want to do business with and you can be kind of in control of your own destiny and it's fun. That's why I do what I do, James.  James: Awesome. Awesome. Glenn:  My question is James, why do you do what you do?   James: I that a real question? Glenn: Yeah, It's a real question. James:  Actually, no one has ever asked me that question when I ask that question but that's a really good question. I do what I do because I'm trying to make a big impact in the world.  So real estate is just a tool for me. I mean, basically, my reason would be how I impact. I mean, I love impacting other people's life. I mean, you say it, you made an impact to those employees lives and we make, as real estate entrepreneurs, we make impacts into many people's lives, into the communities lives, into our employees' lives. We also give a lot of donations out. And how do I impact orphans, kids who are orphans in the third world country and we pay a lot of money for their education and all that. So impacting their lives and it gives you fulfillment. I mean that's why I do what I do.  Glenn: I love it. I love it. You ask me hard questions. I get asked you one at the very end. You want to make a difference in the world, I think it's awesome.  James: Yeah, yeah. As I said you can make money and you can forget about how much you made after a few years but impacting people's lives, when you really see that you've touched someone's life in a big way that comes with you until you die so that's important. Glenn: James, you're a good man.  James: Thank you. Glenn: You're putting together some cool deals, you're writing a book and you invite people like me to come on your show and share our story and I just think you're a pretty cool guy, man. Thank you. James: Thank you. Yeah, why not tell our audience and listeners, how to get hold of you, how to get in touch with you.  Glenn: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So my phone number... James: You're really gonna give your phone number? Glenn: Yeah. 5 1 2 9 3 7 5 9 6 4 and I have an email address glenn@obsidiancapitalco.com  And you can also go to the website, we're there too.  James: Thank you very much, Glenn, for being on the show and sharing all your awesome tips. We have so much value in terms of property management, in terms of your personal thought process and that's what I want to get out of the podcast because sometimes, as I said, it's not only making money it's also what's behind the person. That's why I do this podcast.  Glenn: To make a difference in the world. Thanks, James. James: Exactly. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.  Glenn: Ok.  James: Bye.

When I sit and reflect on all the people I've encountered in my life, I feel grateful. It's not because every person I've met has been pleasant—I'm just thankful to have encountered the variety. On one end of the spectrum, I've met many people filled with pride and hubris, touching others with the subtleness of a shotgun blast. Sometimes I've even been that person. Other times I've met extremely grounded people that choose to affect the world kindly, one day at a time, person-to-person. It was my good fortune to have that friendly and gentle type come and visit me on Find the Good News in the person of Kayla Rigney. Kayla Rigney is the executive director of the Calcasieu Community Clinic, a non-profit free health care clinic located on the McNeese State University campus in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Kayla and the staff at the Calcasieu Community Clinic provide medical care to low-income and working uninsured people in the Imperial Calcasieu region. As it turns out, this is the perfect home for a good-natured person like Kayla, and the more I spoke with her, the more I could see the fit. Kayla has a knack for being realistic yet optimistic, grounded and hopeful. She seems to understand whether life brings you troubles or rewards, it is your attitude that makes all the difference in your quality of life. While the clinic she works for affects the many, Kayla tries to keep her focus on the individuals, the particulars of the people she encounters. She knows their stories, she knows where they come from, and because her heart is open to them, she can genuinely care about them in a personal way. I'd like to adopt more of Kayla's direction in my life, touching people in simple ways, one-by-one, face-to-face, not from a distance. I think we could all benefit from that. The world could benefit from that. The world is full of problems—It's easy to get gridlocked. If we take a page from Kayla Rigney, if we do one good thing for one person, just a little, when and where we can, then we won't have to find the good news. Like Kayla, we'll be making good news every day. ========== FOR MORE INFO ABOUT KAYLA RIGNEY >> www.facebook.com/Kayla.Mallett.Rigney or www.calcasieucommunityclinic.com  ========== FIND THE GOOD NEWS IS PRODUCED BY PARKER BRAND CREATIVE SERVICES >> www.ParkerBrandUp.com ========== SUPPORT OUR ADVERTISERS ••••••••••••• BEN VON DUKE'S HANDYMAN SERVICE >> www.facebook.com/BenVonDukeMaint or Call (337) 540-1355 ••••••••••••• FRESH FUEL >> www.TheFreshFuel.com or www.facebook.com/thefreshfuel  ••••••••••••• ASAP GLASS >> www.ASAPGlassCo.com or Call (337) 527-5455 ••••••••••••• WHISTLE STOP DANCESPORT >> Call (337) 515-7577 ••••••••••••• BRIMSTONE MUSEUM >> www.brimstonemuseum.org or Call (337) 527-0357 •••••••••••••

Church.Life While growing up my family attended one church throughout my entire childhood. In fact, the only other church I ever stepped foot in was another United Methodist Church my grandmother attended in a neighboring town. But throughout my adult life I've been part of numerous churches. I've pastored five different churches, attended five different churches in college and seminary, and attended dozens of churches on Sunday mornings during vacations. I've been around lots of churches. And throughout my years around the Church I've seen it all. I've seen bad church experiences. I've seen friendship cliques. I've seen weird, annoying people. I've seen quintessentially boring churches. Sometimes I've even been part of creating these types of bad church experiences. Maybe you've had these types of bad church experiences and perhaps, like me, you've also helped create some. But that's not what God had in mind when God created the Church. God did not create the Church to be an hour Sunday morning service. God did not create the church so that God's servants would spend their entire week gearing up for a one-hour performance. God did create the Church so a pastor can preach for 30 minutes and parishioners sit and quietly listen. God did not create the Church so people can get their itchy ears scratched, or pastors can get their egos fed, or people can gather together but still be disconnected. God had something totally different in mind when God created the church in Acts 2. Author Scott McKnight characterizes the church in Acts 2 with these words: Friendship Teaching the Faith Common Meals Spirituality Worship Holistic Care for One Another Integrity Growth That's the kind of Church I want to know, to be part of, to give my life for, to lead. I pray First Church is becoming that kind of church. Oh, we have our quirks, like every church. And like every church, we've played our part in creating bad church experiences for some folks. But I think we can take a giant step in our journey as we examine our Church.Life. Join us this Sunday at First Church OKC at 10:45 am as we strive to live out this One.Life in our Church.Life. Pastor Lesly

What is (and is not) working with inbound marketing in 2019? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, world-renowned author and keynote speaker Marcus Sheridan shares is kicking off our first episode of 2019 with his perspective on what it will take to succeed with inbound marketing in the year to come. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my discussion with Marcus include: While most marketers are talking about "authenticity" as though it is a new trend, Marcus says that to do inbound marketing well, you've always had to be authentic. The reason that most marketers haven't been able to capture the feeling of authenticity tends to be the lack of buy-in amongst company leadership. In 2019, we as marketers can't just answer our audience's questions in writing - we're going to have to show them (through video) and tell them (through audio). Companies that produce their own written, video and audio content in-house will do far better in terms of ROI in 2019 than those who choose to outsource it. The most successful companies are the ones that build a culture of inbound that supports in-house content creation. In 2019, sales teams need to be embedded with marketing teams so that the content they create truly addresses the needs of prospects and can serve as a sales aid. Alignment between sales, marketing, and leadership, and the buy-in for inbound marketing that results, is for the most part just as much a problem today as it was 10 years ago. Marketers need to stop speaking like marketers and start speaking the language of sales and leadership. One way that marketers can get more buy-in from sales or senior leadership is to use their conference and training budgets to send people in those positions to marketing conferences such as INBOUND. The concepts behind They Ask, You Answer are just as relevant today as they were when Marcus first came up with it because great, educational content will always be a valuable sales tool and an effective way to help your leads prequalify themselves. Self-selection and self-configuration tools will yield tremendous results for companies in 2019. HubSpot's website grader is a great example of a self-selection tool. The best way to position your company as a leader in the year ahead is to always be asking yourself "what can we do to reduce the friction in the buying experience?" Companies that produce two to three textual or video pieces of content a week should to start to see hockey stick growth after the first year.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Email Marcus Sheridan at Marcus@MarcusSheridan.com or MSheridan@ImpactBND.com Marcus Sheridan on Facebook Marcus Sheridan on Twitter Listen to the podcast to get Marcus's playbook for success with inbound marketing in 2019. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today I am especially excited to announce that my guest is the one and only Marcus Sheridan. Welcome, Marcus. Marcus Sheridan (Guest): Yay. Happy to be here, Kathleen. It's going to be a great conversation, I'm sure. Marcus and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I am so excited. This is the first episode of the Inbound Success Podcast for 2019. Marcus: It's a good start. Let's start this party right. Kathleen: It can't get better than that, right? I wanted to start, really, with something big. That's why I asked you here. About Marcus Sheridan Kathleen: For those listening, if you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years and you don't know who Marcus Sheridan is, he is a partner at IMPACT, which is the agency I'm with. He's also the author of They Ask You Answer. He is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker on topics relating to marketing and communication. He is the principal and the founder at Marcus Sheridan International. That is a very brief bio. Marcus, for anybody out there who might not know who you are or those who may not know what you're doing now, could you just take a minute or two and catch everyone up? Marcus: I'll try to do the really fast 101. The one that you didn't mention was I'm still a pool guy, too. I started out of college a swimming pool company called River Pools. Things were going okay up until the market collapse in 2008, 2009. That was when we were getting ready to lose everything and ended up embracing what we call today They Ask You Answer. To make a long story short, it became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. That company really took off. It's extremely strong today. I wrote about what I was doing at River Pools, and as I wrote about that, that opened up other opportunities to speak and to do consulting. Started an agency. It was called The Sales Lion, but we merged at the beginning of 2018 with IMPACT. That's why I'm one of the partners there. Today, I also have Marcus Sheridan International, which to your point, that's really my speaking company, Kathleen. It's a bureau, as well. In other words, companies contact us that are having events and they're looking for particular speaker capabilities, subject matter, whatever. We're really well connected, so we recommend those. We essentially broker that. It's a lot of fun. I like to dabble with that, which I'm passionate about. They're very diverse, too, which is interesting. A pool company, an agency, a bureau, B2Bs, B2Cs in there. It's a great sandbox to experiment with and to say, "Hey, this is what's working here. This is what's working there. This is what's not working." Kathleen: That's what I think is so interesting about you is that you have, to me, a really different perspective on marketing and what works with marketing. I would refer to it as a human-centered perspective. I've known you for a while. I've followed you for longer than I've known you personally. I always appreciated that you're not necessarily a marketing guy. I mean, people think of you as a marketing guy, but you're more like a guy who's trying really hard to deeply understand people and what will work when you want to communicate with or connect with people. To me, that's the theme that underlies everything you do, but I think that's also the theme that needs to underlie marketing. Marcus: I'm glad you've noticed that, because I think that's a really big deal. I think one of the reasons why I've been really successful speaking about marketing is because I don't speak like a marketer. One of the biggest issues that our space has is silos that exist between sales and marketing and marketing and leadership. One of the big reasons for that is most marketers fail to instill the vision of what they're trying to do and achieve with everybody else on staff. That's because they talk about it in a way that is marketing-centric. Me, I've always spoken the language of, foremost, the business owner that was very concerned with sales and revenue. That happens to include marketing but not the other way around. That's, I think, why They Ask You Answer resonated so well with business owners and CEOs, salespeople. That's always my hope, Kathleen, is that I can be human-centric in the way that I talk about the thing. The moment you stop that, you start to lose certain portions of your audience. Here's silly examples. I was a pool guy and a business owner for 10 years. I didn't know what the words B2B or B2C meant until I started going to conferences. I was a business owner. I wasn't dumb, but I had no idea what they meant. I didn't know what top, middle, bottom of the funnel necessarily meant. ToFu, MoFu, BoFu -this junk. I hope that I never suffer so much from the curse of knowledge that I can't communicate with your average Joe or Jane business owner, CEO, whoever that is. Kathleen: Amen. Marketers are terrible violators of the jargon and acronyms and technical word rule. We should be great communicators. I mean, that's kind of what we're taught to do if you're a trained marketer. I've always heard people say that marketers, when they put on their marketing hat, they forget everything they know about being a human being. Marcus: Fundamentally, we're outrageously assumptive. We assume that people understand us, our products, our services, our lingo. You see this a lot with just content marketing in general. I'm constantly reading stuff, I'm like, "They actually think I know what they're talking about right now, and I don't." One of the industries that I think is the worst at this that I've messed around a little bit with is the big data industry. You find somebody out there that can define big data in a way that the common man or woman understands it, they're going to be rich. Let me tell you, these big data companies, they can't articulate what they do. They can't articulate the problem they solve. Because of that, if you ask somebody, "What is all this big data stuff about?" they say, "I don't really know." Unless they're in the field, they don't actually know. Kathleen: I would tend to agree. I mean, it's interesting. As somebody who's been in agencies for a long time, you work with people in lots of different industries. I have found that it's the more technically complex industries that have a harder time communicating, 'cause they fall back on industry jargon. I worked with a lot of cybersecurity companies, and they couldn't get out of their own way talking about what they did. Marcus: That's correct. Kathleen: That's often why they need to bring in outsiders to help them with their messaging. It's easier to come in as somebody who knows nothing and be like, "Talk to me about what you do. If you can make me understand it as your marketer or as your consultant, then I can make anybody else understand it." Marcus: Our good friend Ian Altman talks about this. You always start not with what you do but the problems you solve. If especially every B2B company replaced solutions in their navigation bar in their website and replaced that with problems you solve, you would see there would be this drastic, dramatic difference in how often those particular pages were frequented. I mean, fundamentally, what the buyer needs to do, the prospect, they need to be able to nod their head and they say, "Okay, now I get it. Ah, that's me. That's exactly what I'm experiencing. That's what I'm going through right now." Unless it's stated that way, it's not good. Kathleen: Now, you've been preaching about problems they solve for a long time. I'm not sure that'll ever change, 'cause that, again, speaks to the fundamental human need and the way we connect and communicate and comprehend. What Is (And Is Not) Working With Inbound Marketing in 2019 Kathleen: I want to take a step back. The big reason I wanted to talk to you for my first episode of 2019 was that, since I've been involved in inbound marketing, even since I've been doing this podcast ... by the time this goes live, I'll have done probably 75 episodes. Even in just that short amount of time, so much has changed in the world of inbound marketing. The podcast is about inbound. Most of my listeners listen because they're interested in inbound marketing. When I first created this podcast, it was really to scratch an itch that I had, which was you hear these stories of people who are getting amazing results and doing great things. I really wanted to be able to find out what exactly are they doing to get those results in a way that felt very actionable. Normally, when I interview people, we talk about what's a specific strategy or a specific tactic you're doing, or tell me about a campaign. We're not going to do that today. What I wanted to talk with you about is, looking back at the evolution of the field of inbound marketing, if we can even call it a field, when it first became a thing, there was very much a formulaic approach to it. HubSpot drove that. They invented the term. They came up with a methodology that was driven by their product, and all of that has evolved over time. In a lot of ways, it's still very driven by HubSpot's product and the need to promote the use of that. To step outside of that product-driven world, I'd love to ... this is going to be a big question that I'll throw out and then we can drill down. I'd love to find out from your standpoint with inbound marketing, with where we are today in the world we live in now, what is still working from that original philosophy or approach? What are the timeless elements? What's not working, and what do you think is going to be needed to really knock it out of the park? Let's just talk about 2019, 'cause I can't even forecast what's going to happen in 2020. Who knows? There could be robots that rule the world by that point. Marcus: You're exactly right. What is still working ... I think to answer that question, you have to look at principles. The beauty behind principles is they're timeless and they should, hypothetically, always be working. It's funny to me that all of the sudden you hear more and more people talking about trust, authenticity, and transparency. It's like, "Guys, this is not new." The idea authenticity's the big thing in 2019 ... seriously? If we've been doing this the right way, since even when HubSpot was started ... the whole premise behind They Ask You Answer is an obsession with the way buyers think and the willingness to address exactly what that thought is. Sometimes the thought is a question, and that question could be good, bad, or ugly. Usually, when we're willing to address the bad and the ugly, that's when people call us authentic. That should have been happening for a while now. Now, the reason why it didn't happen for many is because of the buy-in issues and the lack of implementation across the board, the vision, lack thereof, from leaders of organizations. One thing that is working just as well today as it was when I got on HubSpot in 2009 is the idea of truly obsessing over your customers' questions. I'm talking about the difficult ones. And the willingness to address them well. Now, how that's evolved, though, is the way that we address it. Maybe now we're saying we can't just write it. We've got to also show it through video and not just say it. We've got to eventually give them the ability to listen to it. We're talking about voice here, which I don't think is the major 2019 play. I think voice, although I'm working on it right now ... I just had a River Pools skill developed for Alexa that's very good. You're going to see it here soon, Kathleen. Kathleen: I can't wait to test it out. Marcus: It's really neat. It'll have a full fiberglass swimming pool conversation with you. I'm only doing that now not because I think I'm going to need it in 2019, but I think I'm going to need it in 2020. I think this authenticity thing ... it bugs me a bit, because that's been working for a long time now. What doesn't work in conjunction with content while we talk about that is we've known for a while that quality was important, but I think it's really starting ... how long have people been outsourcing content and getting results? Now you see fewer and fewer companies outsourcing content and getting results. Of course, the question is why? Because A) it's not authentic, B) it doesn't truly represent the soul of your business, C) it usually isn't qualitative enough to truly answer the question well, whatever it is, in an expert-like way where the reader, the viewer, the listener can say, "Okay, I get it. Now I understand." What we're seeing here, we've seen this at IMPACT tremendously, is that when companies take ownership of the thing, the skill -- in this case, that might be producing the textual content or producing the videos in-house , even though often times there's a bit of a learning curve, embrace the messy that comes with that at first -- they end up catapulting way beyond those that outsource those six videos a year to some video production company or outsource a blog post every week to a ghost writer. Which, come on. If the ghost writer's any good, they've got to interview all your SMEs, your subject matter experts, anyway. It's essentially like you're doing it in-house. You can't escape it anymore. You can't do this half-cocked, like, "Let's just dip our toes." Sometimes companies come to me, Kathleen, and say, "I just want to dip our toes in the water." I think you could probably do that a little bit before. You can't dip your toes in content and be really successful. You either play hard or you just don't play. Just do something different. You know what I'm saying? Kathleen: I couldn't agree more. Like I said, I've been in the agency world for a long time and have played around with different solutions to the content question. When I had my own agency, a lot of our clients didn't want to write their own content. In the beginning, we were trying to just purely outsource it. We would have an insurance agency that wanted us to do blogs and they'd say, "We need blogs on these ten topics." We'd find a writer and that writer would write them. They were fine, but to be perfectly honest, if a writer is writing a blog on 10 things you should know before you buy car insurance and they're not an insurance expert, what are they doing? They're going out and they're Googling. They're finding 10 other blogs with the answer, and they're basically just rewriting what's already in existence. It doesn't add any value. The only way you can add value is if you are delivering something unique, original, different. That can either be factual information. It can be a point of view. It can be an analysis, what have you. I completely agree. The only time we only had success with creating content for clients was exactly what you described. We had the amazing Liz Murphy, who is now with IMPACT today, who figured out this methodology of doing phone interviews with our client subject matter experts. 15 minutes per article. She would just extract all the knowledge out of their brain, turn it in into an article. She'd still have to send it back to them and they'd still have to be a part of the process. Would it be better if they wrote it themselves? Absolutely. At that time, that was the most we could get them to do. The difference in the results was dramatic between that and the alternative. Marcus: There's a definitive profile of the companies we've seen with world-class digital inbound marketing case studies versus the ones that have not. Almost every single time, it comes back to ownership. What can they do, what can they produce themselves? This is why at IMPACT we've been shifting the traditional way, which is do it for you, versus walk with you, grab your hand and walk down that trail together. I've seen time and time again, if a company hires a videographer, that's usually not enough, because that videographer, they might know video, but they don't yet know how to create sales, marketing, and customer experience videos. That's different. They don't know sales and marketing strategy. If they have somebody that teaches them that ... the good thing is it doesn't take a lifetime to learn that. Within a certain period of time, you can take that person that just knew how to do video and create documentaries or create films and truly turn them into someone that understands what the visual sale looks like. Now, the whole company can have a culture of video in-house. I think that idea of having a culture of inbound in-house, a culture of video in-house, a culture of content, of teachers in-house -- I think that this is a principle. I think that is not going to go away for a while. There's a very strong decade of this. I know AI's going to play with all this stuff, but AI, what they won't do, is they're not going to be able to replicate the videos that I'm doing right now. There's something about those that is extremely human that resonates with the marketplace. Instead of worrying about that, we've got to establish ourselves. Are we learning how to do these things in-house as organizations? Are we eliminating the silos? Does the sales team realize they're a part of marketing? I think, before, marketing could be on an island in 2009, Kathleen. I don't think marketing can be on an island today. I don't think they can have great success if they're not embedded with the sales team. If the sales team and the other subject matter experts aren't at least involved somewhat, some way, shape, or form in the content production process, I would argue that it's almost impossible for it to fly big at this point in time. Kathleen: It's really interesting that you just said that, 'cause when I was listening to you talk about having a culture of inbound, a culture of content, a culture of video, in my head I was picturing somebody listening to this podcast, and most of my listeners tend to be marketers, and picturing them having a panic attack. Many of the marketers I've spoken to I think would love to have more company-wide alignment or support around what they do, but I feel like a lot of them either don't know how to get it, are afraid to ask for it, or in some cases --and I have had clients tell me this --I have had clients say, "I don't want to open up that can of worms. I don't want to have the attention that that would bring." There's a real fear within marketers of that kind of change. How do you navigate that process? I mean, you've worked with a lot of companies on this- Marcus: The problem is marketers have to understand just a few realities. One of the biggest realities is that if you have a CFO, if you have somebody that's paying the bills, unless you can really start to prove that you're driving revenue for the company, you're always going to be underpaid, underappreciated, and not really listened to, which is frustrating, but it's true. What has not improved at nearly the rate that it should have is this alignment between sales, marketing, and leadership. That has not happened over the course of what is now for me about 10 years of being in this space. Buy-in for the most part is just as much a problem today as it was 10 years ago. Kathleen: Why do you think that is? Marcus: There's a multiplicity of reasons. Let me break them down, a few of them, for you. The first one was our original conversation on this call: marketers need to stop speaking like marketers and start speaking the language of sales and leadership. That's major. Number two. You go to an event like INBOUND or any of these other events, 90% of the room is still marketers. Then you have a handful of salespeople and leadership. More often than not what happens is they get fired up at INBOUND, they get a ton of ideas, they go back to the office on Monday, and everybody rains on their parade, because they weren't there. The reason why leadership so often pushes back, it's not because they're a stick in the mud. It's because they're ignorant of the thing. I don't say that in a bad way. It's just truth. Because they're ignorant of it, they say things like, "I don't have the time," or, "No, I just don't think that's in the budget right now." The reason why we say things like time and budget has nothing to do with time and almost never budget, but it's always because, "I don't value it like you do." Why don't they, Kathleen? Because they haven't been educated nearly well enough yet. It is still the fundamental problem in this entire inbound space. That's why marketers have to be obsessing over that. Sometimes I've had marketers tell me this before. I'm like, "When's the last time you went to leadership and said, 'You know what? You gave me a $2,500 education budget this year. I would like to give you, Mr. or Ms. CEO, my ticket to INBOUND. Would you be willing to go in my place? I will stay here and man the fort. Your vision for what I'm doing is more important than me going there and hearing about all of which I already know'?" We don't do that. We don't send the sales manager. We don't give up our budget, either, do we? We keep going to INBOUND. We keep going to Content Marketing World or maybe even IMPACT Live, which is really where you need to be going the most. This is what we're not doing. This is what we've got to change. Those are the two biggest reasons. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live using the code "SUCCESS" Click here to learn more about IMPACT Live or purchase tickets now Kathleen: It's interesting. I don't often talk about IMPACT on the podcast on purpose. It's not about the company. It's about inbound marketing. I will interject and say that we have this conference in August and we just this year launched this package for teams because of this kind of thing. We really believe you should come with your group of people from your company and experience something together so that you leave and you're charged up and you're excited and you're all on the same page. Marcus: Do you know how many times I have talked to a salesperson at an event and they will say things like, "I finally get it. I finally understand"? It's so sad. Think about how many frustrated marketers are listening to this right now, Kathleen. I would say there's a third reason, too, of this buy-in issue. It goes back to education. As I've stated before at times in different places, the number one email that I've gotten over the course of these almost 10 years is ... it's not from business owners saying, "We need more traffic, leads, and sales." It's number two. The number one, "Marcus, I'm a marketer. I'm frustrated. I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm alone, of having to scratch and claw for anything to get approved. I'm almost ready to leave my company." I've seen so many leave, Kathleen. Now, part of this, and this is the third part, is that when we start these digital campaigns, what does the start look like? In other words, let's say you've been doing inbound for a while and I went to your sales team right now and I said to them, "How come we're producing all this content?" More often than not, they wouldn't know. They wouldn't have an answer. That's the problem. That denotes that there is a serious issue. We got to fix that. I've taught so many workshops. The marketers are the ones that call me initially and I say, "Look. You don't need to be at the workshop. I don't care if you're there, 'cause you're already all in. Your sales team has to be there. If they're not there, I'm not going to show up, because everything starts and stops with them anyway." Kathleen: You're really good, I will say, at holding people's feet to the fire about that kind of thing. Marcus: Because I'm willing to go through the pain on the front end so that we can have the pleasure on the rear. The issue is we're too afraid, often times, to address this ugly reality on the front end. Then we wonder, "Why didn't the campaign work? Why did we get the pushback? Why so many obstacles? Why so much red tape?" I just had a company a few days ago call me. Hundreds of employees. They're a pharma company. They're like, "Marcus, regulation is making this impossible." I said, "Well, okay. Regulation is potentially a problem in healthcare. But the fact is, do you have somebody in leadership that is an advocate and that can go to that department and can talk with them about what is and is not kosher and can ensure that those that are dealing with the regs, that they catch the vision that is digital sales and marketing for your organization?" "No we don't have that person yet." Of course then you're getting pushback. All they're hearing is somebody in marketing tell them, "Hey, we need this approved." Leadership's not saying, "We need this approved." That's why it happens. We have to do the hard stuff on the front end to experience the pleasure later. Kathleen: One issue is absolutely buy-in and getting buy-in from the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, all through the organization. Let's say the organization has buy-in and they agree they want to move forward, they want to produce their content, they're going to embrace this approach. You wrote They Ask You Answer, which is very much a blueprint for how you should tackle content creation. Is it still applicable today? I mean, are we in a world where everybody's already doing They Ask You Answer, or is there still room? Marcus: Often times people say, "My industry, Marcus, is so saturated. How could we ever find success with so much saturation?" That's because, again, they're looking at it as a marketing play. Let's turn this around for a second, Kathleen. Let's say that you produced a video that's specific to addressing some of the major questions your sales team's getting all the time and dealing with all the time. Let's say that video never ever gets watched on YouTube, ever. At the same time, let's say that the sales team gets it and they immediately integrate it in the sales process. They use it to send to the client before they have the first sales call. Because the client often times does watch it, now they spend less time on the first sales time, because they're way more educated, they've heard the company doctrine on these major questions that are asked, and now the conversation is less teaching, more selling. The sales team loves it. Was it a successful video? Another scenario. Let's say that you have this whole plethora of questions, fears, worries, concerns, et cetera addressed on your website. Let's say none of these articles or videos have ever produced a single organic lead from search. But let's say, because of that, now when anybody comes to the site from pay per click, their user experience is so much better that your conversion rates go up there. Let's say now whenever anybody comes to your site from social, all of which that content you were using on social in the first place, when they come as a referral from social, now the user experience is so much better they say, "These guys are different. I trust them. I'm going to contact them." Or, let's say that it's a referral. Still to this day, even if it's a word of mouth referral, they're still going to vet you first on the site probably before they call. When they come to the site, are they going to feel different? Are they going to be satiated? You see, we overestimate the quality of the content in the messaging of our competitors. Everybody does this bad. There's still a bunch of blue oceans. Even if the textual content is saturated in your space --and I still believe that we should produce that, because it's rare that that's the case --the video content in most industries is still wide stinking open. There's the final element to this, Kathleen. Let's say your marketing team never benefits from it, your sales team never benefits from it from a straight sales standpoint. Is it worth it? There's this thing that happens when you produce content that nobody seems to talk about. You know this as a writer, as a content producer. You start to figure out what you're trying to say and you figure out what your opinion, what your doctrine, what your philosophy is on that subject. When you do this as a company, it forces you to take a stand. When you do this now, this will become the training manual for any new employee that ever comes on, any sales person that ever comes on and says, "How do we approach this question? How do we feel about this?" The answers are already there. That's why this is so relevant. I think that's going to maintain itself for quite a while, regardless of how much saturation is out there. Now, there is a level up, though, Kathleen. It used to be that we might just say, "What is the best swimming pool?" That might have been the question before, but now we're getting more specific, like, "What is the best type of swimming pool for me?" This is why one of the big focus areas that I think we should all have that is just rife with opportunity, I mean, just so heavy of opportunity right now in 2019 and beyond is the trend of self-selection and self-configuration. In other words, let's say you came to the River Pools website right now. Let's say you didn't have any idea what type of pool you want. "Do I want an in-ground pool? Do I want an above ground pool? If I do want an in-ground pool, should it be concrete, should it be vinyl-lined, or should it be fiberglass?" Is there an unbiased tool that you could walk through that would ask you a series of questions and be interactive that would essentially give you some type of output in the end that would say, "Okay, Kathleen. Based on what you just said, it sounds like a concrete pool or a fiberglass pool or an above ground pool is the right choice for you." These interactive styles of self-selection and self-configuration, they are so monumental. So few companies are doing them at all right now, Kathleen. This is the level up of what you and I might call traditional content marketing. Kathleen: It's interesting. I've had some experiences with those kinds of tools. Now as I tell this story, I'm totally going to out myself and my age range. My experience with self-configuration tools was when I first noticed I was getting some little gray hairs on my head. Marcus: That happens to all of us at that 40-ish age. Kathleen: I was like, "Okay, got to cover those up." I don't know. I'm not somebody who spends a lot of money on salons and things. Funny enough, I heard about this hair color company through the TechCrunch blog. This is how much of a geek I am. They were talking about how this company was really upending the model of hair color. It's called Madison Reed. I was like, "If TechCrunch thinks this company is cool, I'm going to check them out instead of going to CVS and trying to find a box of hair color on the shelf." I got to the website and it's exactly what you described. It was like, "What is your natural hair color?" I said brown. "Is it more reddish brown, blondish brown?" Blondish brown. "Has it been colored before? How much gray do you have? How long is it? How curly is it?" All these questions and then it basically said, "Here is the perfect color for you. By the way, if this doesn't look perfect, here are the next three if you want to see what those look like." I became a customer. Not only did I become a customer, but they're so smart, they have a subscription plan. Now it's on a "set it and forget it" thing where it comes to my house every few weeks. That's amazing. I don't even have to think about it any more, and they've got a customer for life. Marcus: You've got to send me that link, by the way. I want to see that. I'd like to do that myself. Kathleen: You've got some grays you want to cover? Marcus: I'm so fascinated with self-configuration right now. We've been working with it at River Pools. To give people an idea, we've got one at River Pools we're developing that is, what is the best shape and size for me for my swimming pool? The other one is, what is the best type of swimming pool for me? The best type of swimming pool for me is the most top of the funnel. What is the right shape and size for me is lower in the funnel. How much is my fiberglass swimming pool going to cost, that's even lower in the funnel. I'm trying to develop a perfect pricing tool. It's never been developed in our industry before. I want people to be able to get close numbers even before they talk to a sales person. Again, a lot of people think that's crazy. If you've read They Ask You Answer, you know how this works, you know how applicable it is, whether it's B2B or B2C. Those two examples we just used now were both B2C, but this is relevant in the B2B space as anything. Everybody should be thinking about self-configuration right now. I think that's a major that we all need to be upping our game with as we go forward. Kathleen: It'll be fun to see what you come up with there, 'cause there are a couple of examples that I can think of of companies that have done the pricing part really well with complex things. For example, there's window treatment companies where you put in the exact size of your window and the fabric you want and this and that. It's complex, but I'll tell you, I only order from companies like that, 'cause I don't want to go into the store. It works. Marcus: How would I set this up? If somebody contacts you right now, a legitimate prospect, what are all the questions that sales consultant is already asking? If you talk to a sales consultant about your hair, every single one of those that you mentioned, that's what they would have said. The beauty behind this, it's dramatically more efficient and it induces a friction-free buying experience. If our guide, as we go forward 2019 and beyond, is we say, "Is there anything I can do that lessens the friction?" There's a very good chance that that means your leader of your space, because antiquated, traditional thinking generally is very friction-based. It's the opposite of today's buyer. Most swimming pool companies would say, "We could never give pricing, period. We can't talk about pricing." Everybody knows for years I've been talking about pricing. I've been giving ranges of pricing. I've been talking about all the factors of pricing, but now I'm trying to give actual prices as close as possible. We've already got a little bit of this developed on the site. It's a lead generating machine already. I mean, it's really, really beautiful, this pricing tool that we have. Anybody can set this up, regardless of what you are. B2B, B2C, service product, big, small, local, national. This is the mindset that we have to have. Let's make it easier on the buyer. Let's see if we can mimic or replicate the in-real-life sales experience. Can we replicate that online through the digital experience? If you can do the self-configuration combined with beautiful video explanations of that thing ... one of the issues, Kathleen, is whenever you do these types of self-configuration tools, inevitably, again, because the curse of knowledge, the company will ask you a question that you don't know. For example, if I'm a pool guy and I say, "Do you think you want a heat pump or a gas heater with your swimming pool?" most people have no idea. You don't know that. Kathleen: No. I would have no idea. Marcus: If I can have an explanation, especially if it's a video explanation, now that you can just quickly click and say, "Here's where you would want to fall. Here's the pros and cons of each one. Hopefully that helps you decide which is the best for you." That allows you say, "Okay, perfect." If you're a consultant, this is the same thing. Every consultant in the B2B space asks a series of questions to their prospects. Can we handle that on the front end? One of the things that we're trying to develop at IMPACT right now that Bob and I are talking a lot about is we constantly assess these companies and we let them know where are they from a digital perspective, what's their impediments and all these things. Can we replicate that on the front end? The most forward-thinking on this was Dharmesh with Website Grader in 2007-8 time period. When he came out with that, that was so stupidly ahead of his time. It was genius. That was the catalyst for me. That was the great motivator for me. The first time I took that, which is essentially ... it was a self-assessment tool. That's all that was. I got a 37 out of 100, and I said, "Bull. That's not me. I'm not a 37 out of 100. I'm going to show you wrong, Website Grader." Then I went on this glorious journey. Of course- Kathleen: Boy, did you show it wrong. Marcus: It's what propelled me. It gave me that drive. I could keep going back and saying, "Okay, now it's at a 42. Now it's at a 49. Now it's at a 75." Kathleen: In my mind, when I hear you talking about all this, I feel like how I know this is possible is that if there was ever an industry that was unnecessarily overcomplicated in terms of the research and the purchasing process, it was cars. I've heard you talk a lot about CarMax. To me, there's even a leader further ahead of CarMax now, which is Carvana. You can buy your stinking car out of the vending machine with Carvana. They literally have car vending machines. Marcus: That's correct. Usually, the leader of the previous generation is slowest to adopt the next one. What happened was most of the successful used car dealers said things like, "There's no way we could ever offer a five-day money-back guarantee. There's no way that we could have this intensive inspection process, which would essentially eliminate the possibility of selling any lemons to the marketplace. There's no way we could do all these things to eliminate the fears of buying a used car." CarMax came in, turned the industry on its head, and did that. But CarMax is going to get replaced by the Carvanas, the TrueCars of the world, because they're making it even more friction free. If we're not looking to replace ourselves and our business model and the way that we do it, then there's a good chance we're off. When I started They Ask You Answer, Kathleen, I really thought it was a blogging strategy. This is why when you talk about something, you learn what you're trying to say. You just discover it over time. It's a fluid experience. They Ask You Answer became that, but it became an obsession with the way buyers think and the willingness to evolve with said buyer. If a company's embracing They Ask You Answer, they don't make statements like, "I don't watch videos, so why in the heck would we create them for our customers?" It's like, our opinions don't matter. They don't mean jack squat. The only thing that matters is, what does the marketplace want? They Ask You Answer is basically saying, "People would like to buy it like this. I know it's never been sold like that in our industry before. Let's just strip out all the rules, all the regs. Is it possible that it was sold that way?" That's when you have entire industries flipped on their head. We're seeing it over and over again. It's such a fun time to be alive if you're the type of person that likes to fill in outside of the circle, because that means you're willing to break the rules. You just don't have these confines, these parameters that everybody else has. You say, "Why not? I mean, of course we could do that." Kathleen: So many interesting things here. We've got self-configuration tools. We've got creating your own content. We've got taking They Ask You Answer approach. We've got using video to show and not just tell. For the companies that you have worked with on this and the companies that are doing it right ... I know that you work with a wide range of companies. They're not always the sexy disrupters of their industry like a Carvana. Some of them are a plumber- Marcus: I love unsexy, nerdy, just stuff that you would traditionally think, "They couldn't do this," and they end up killing it. What Does Inbound Success Look Like in 2019? Kathleen: That's what I was going to say. In today's world, when you say killing it ... if somebody's listening and they're thinking, "Alright. I could maybe try this approach," what kinds of results should they expect and what does killing it mean these days? Is it a nice 5% increase every month over time? Can you still hockey stick? What does success look like? Marcus: We see lots of hockey stick growth when it comes to traffic, leads and sales. When I really started teaching They Ask You Answer, I didn't necessarily know what were the major bullet points of success in all of these most successful organizations, 'cause I didn't have enough case studies yet. I had River. That's all I really had. Came to realize there is a few essentials that you got to do, that you've got to have. If you have these essentials, there's a good chance you're going to see that growth. First essential is you've got to have buy-in from top to bottom. It's just absolute. Number two, you have to look at this as a long-term play, which mean there's continual updates, education, and awareness about how the program's working, what's happening, everybody knows. Again, it's not a program; it's culture. Number three, that you have owners, specifically of textual content, of video content. Everything has an owner. Unless there's an owner that's not wearing a thousand other hats, generally it's not going to fly. Number four, that it's accepted that everybody has to participate. It's almost like part of the job description. They don't say, "Well, it would be nice." They just do it. It's just what they do. Again, not utopia always. It's just something that we do, we know it's part of the deal. You do certain things with your job you don't love, Kathleen, but you do it because it's just part of the deal. You don't miss it. You don't stop it. It's just who you are. Then the fifth one is they measure everything that they possibly can. That way, they're not having conversations like, "Did this really work?" They're saying, "We spent this much money on a content manager, on a videographer in-house, but we can definitively track that we have generated this much more traffic, this many more leads, and this much more revenue in this process." There's others we could add in there, one of which would be clearly that the sales team obsessively integrates content into the sales process as much as possible. That they're always looking for ways to do this. Somebody might listen to this and say, "Well, we're e-commerce. We don't have a sales team." Yeah, you do. The page is your sales team. Are you integrating content so well into that page that the person says, "Every single question I had about that particular product has now been resolved. I'm ready to click the buy button"? Are we doing these things? We still consistently see, when they do this right, amazing growth, but you've got to be qualitative and quantitative. For a long time, there was this dumb debate of, "Should I focus on quality, or should I focus on quantity?" Well, you've got to do both. That's just the truth. I mean, you can't do one great blog article a month and expect to see hockey stick growth. Generally, that's never going to occur unless you already have some established audience. If Oprah started a blog, she's probably going to get great growth at once a month. We're not Oprah. We can't do that. We continue to see the pattern of great success when you start something is two to three pieces of content a week on that thing. In other words, for most companies, if they're producing two to three textual pieces of content a week, they're going to start to see hockey stick growth after the first year. Same thing with video. What happens is it becomes habit at two to three a week. It just becomes who you are as a company. At two to three a week, you've got to have owners, you see what I mean? Because you have owners, it's like everything is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. This is the pattern that we've seen time and time again. It's fun to watch it. It's really, really neat. They are obsessed about the continual education and they'll add something each year. Maybe they're crushing it with the textual content, they're crushing it with the video. Now they add chat and they want to become the best at chat. Don't try to be great at all these things. Most of the companies don't try to be great at all social media platforms. They recognize if you try to be a jack of all social media trades, you're going end up being a master of none. You're way better off just focusing and being a master of one. This is how it works. You knock out one at a time and you grow that way. The last thing I'll say about this, every company that's been obsessive about They Ask You Answer since the beginning has done everything that Google says today that they want you to do. They were never afraid of a single algorithmic change, because this was a long-term solution to a long-term problem, which is search. Search is a long-term problem. Google's obsession, "Give it to them as quickly as I can. Make it as relevant as possible. Make sure it's the best, most qualitative answer they could possibly get." Anything that doesn't align with that is a short-term solution. Vanity link building that got many people penalized these last few years, that was doing a deal with the devil, Kathleen. It came back to bite so many people. Those that were just doing it right and obsessing over the quality and the quantity component, they're the ones now that own the industry. I MPACT is one of those. 600,000 visitors a month of traffic is a big deal for any agency. The reason why that happens, it's been a long-term play. We ain't out there asking people for their links, though, I'll tell you that. Kathleen: Definitely not. I'm not sure I would enjoy my job very much if that's what it involved. It's like the cold-calling of marketing. Well, you just did a great job of bringing us full circle. I started this conversation talking about how I feel like you've always been somebody who's less focused on how to do marketing and more focused on how to make that human-to-human connection. I think what you closed with, at least the way I heard it was, when you're solving for search engines, the best approach is also to solve for humans, because that's ultimately what the search engines want to solve for. Marcus: They're completely aligned. Kathleen: At the end of the day, all the latest, greatest tactics of marketing don't mean anything if they're not solving for people. Marcus: It's our moral compass. That's always going to bring us back where we need to go. Not to make this about They Ask You Answer, but I'm trying to show the principle here. Whenever we would have a debate about a piece of content, we would say, "Do our customers really want and need to know?" If the answer was yes, we said, "Okay, we're going to talk about it." Kathleen: I love it. Marcus: It always worked. Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I'm going to have extensive show notes on everything that you shared. If somebody was listening and they want to have this, essentially which is a playbook for 2019, they can find it in the show notes. How to Reach Marcus Sheridan Kathleen: We need to close, because I could talk to you forever, but you don't have forever to talk to me. If somebody's listening and they want to learn more, they want to contact you, they want to ask you a question, what's the best way for them to find you online? Marcus: You can still find me at TheSalesLion on the Twitters. You can find me at Facebook. I'm public there. You can email me. An easy one to remember is Marcus@MarcusSheridan.com or MSheridan@ImpactBND.com. Either one works. Hit me up, folks. I love the personal contact. Kathleen, otherwise, this was a pleasure. Hopefully, we delivered a few nuggets today that are going to help those wonderful listeners of yours tomorrow. Kathleen: Absolutely. My one ask to anyone listening is if you do any of this and you see success with it, let me know. I would love to share your story. Maybe you could be somebody that I interview in 2019 about your inbound success. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. Happy New Year. Thank you, Marcus, for joining us and sharing all of your wisdom.

Overcast Link.  My Guest this week is Mason Peck, Professor of Aerospace and Systems engineering at Cornell University and former Chief Technologist at NASA. Previously Mason was a was a Principal Fellow at Honeywell Aerospace and has an extremely colorful history we get into during the podcast. The topic of this conversation is how NASA works, alternatives to the current innovation ecosystem - like crowdsourcing and philanthropy, and also the interplay between government, academia, and private industry. Key Takeaways You can have an organization full of smart motivated people that doesn't produce great results if all the incentives are set up to avoid risk. There's been a shift in where different parts of the innovation pipeline happen. More has shifted universities and startups from larger companies and the government but the systems of support haven't caught up. Taking a portfolio approach to technology and innovation is a powerful concept that we don't think about enough. Links Mason’s Lab (Space System Design Studio) Website Mason on Twitter (@spacecraftlab) The Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Directorate) Breakthrough Starshot Mars One Transcript   Intro   [00:00:00] This podcast I talk to Mason Peck about NASA alternatives to the current Innovation ecosystem like crowdsourcing and philanthropy and also the interplay between government Academia and Private Industry. Officially Mason is a professor of Aerospace and systems engineering at Cornell University, but I think of him as Cornell space exploration guy. He's done research on everything from doing construction in space using superconductors to making spacecraft that can fit in the palm of your hand and cost cents instead of millions of dollars from 2011 to 2013. He served as NASA's Chief technologist. Don't worry. We'll get into what that means in the podcast before becoming a professor.   What is a Chief Technologist   Ben: You spent several years as the chief technologist at Nasa. Can you explain for us what the chief technologist at Nasa actually does. I think that it's a usual role that many people have not heard of. Mason: Sure, NASA's [00:01:00] Chief technologist sets strategy and priorities for NASA's. Let's call them technology Investments. It's helpful to think of it in investment context because it really is that you know, what you're doing is spending money taxpayer money. You want to be a responsible Steward of that money. You're spending that money on. Something like a bet that you hope will pay off in the future. So taking a portfolio approach that problem probably makes sense. At least it made sense to me. I was the chief technologist for NASA for the over two years started in the end of 2011 and continued to little bit into 2014, but mostly it was the two years 2012-2013. And I may just offer it was a wonderful time to be doing that difficult from the standpoint of the budget. There are a lot of challenges at that time budgetarily, but good from the standpoint of lots of great support from the White House the office of Science and Technology policy when I was there was particularly aggressive and committed and [00:02:00] passionate about doing what they thought was the best for the nation and the just the degree of energy and expertise some of those people made it a wonderful ecosystem to work in.   How long term were bets?   Ben: Awesome, and going off of that portfolio approach with the bats.  how long term were those bets? Like what was the the time scale on them? Mason: In the portfolio approach that we tried to? Take some of those bets were the long game. I suppose, you know, 20 years out. There was a program known as NIAC Nayak the NASA Innovative advanced concepts program, which placed bets on to keep using this metaphor. Ideas that probably would pay off in a couple of decades. And by the way, that seems like a hopelessly long time but for spacecraft that's maybe a generation of spacecraft. In fact spacecraft Generations in technological sense almost mirrors the human Generations, if you think of a human generation being 20 years, you could [00:03:00] probably look across the history of space technology. In spot these Rafi 20-year slices where things seem to happen. So some of the investors are definitely 20 years plus others, whereas near term as possible, but it's not just the the duration of time that is how long it would take for these Investments to pay off. It was also about the type of investment that is the ways in which technology was done.   Different types of tech investment   So, If I can go on about that briefly the me, please you say that it's one thing to as one thing to solicit ideas from the traditional offers of technology or DARPA calls the performers, you know, you go to a Lockheed Martin or university what I've Cornell University of just for one example, you go to university and you ask for a certain result and then they can probably deliver that kind of result. There's all the non-traditional offers. For example, when the NASA we would start these challenges or competitions. [00:04:00] The idea was to bring in non-traditional providers people who normally wouldn't have bothered or even have been considered qualified to solve a NASA problem, but through a challenge like a coding challenge a hackathon or maybe a more substantial dollar amount. Prize offered a million dollars for electric aircraft or something through that mechanism you bringing different kinds of people to solve the problem and that's not only the other that's not the only other dimension. Another dimension is whether the problem you're solving is something that is a known problem or something you feel like if you build it they will come. Either that freezes the death to death to investment, right if you say something like I've got this great idea but no one's asking for a right now, but trust me if we build it somebody it will buy it that is not what a venture capitalist for example wants to hear right? However. It is a distinct type of futurism, right?   Mission Pull vs Mission Push   There's what we call pull and push Mission pull refers to [00:05:00] when we have a mission that NASA let's say returning samples from the surface of Mars or sending humans to a distant star. I mean, these are not necessarily necessary. What's this if they are then? The Jews demand certain technological solutions certain Innovations, or if you come up with idea that no one's asking for is their value in that and I'll give you the example of a say spacecraft that are the size of your fingernail right now. You probably know been that this is a topic we were working out of Cornell. I guarantee you no one's asking for that. I can prove that by virtue of how many proposals have been turned down. The basic fact is there are uses for this now. Maybe there aren't enough that are compelling and I'll accept that but the reason no one's asking is because no one knows it can exist and that's not a reason to say no, so. Again, think of the mission pull versus what we call technology push direction if we can come up with a solution that people maybe could use [00:06:00] a little value in working on that think of the dimension. As I said before of different kinds of offers. What are the sources for technology and then of course, there's the timeframe Dimension. So there's at least three dimensions that you might think of for the. Portfolio of Technology Investments That least we took it to kind of NASA and that maybe helps other environments to   Non-traditional vs Traditional Offers   Ben: yeah,  are there some good examples of  non-traditional offers really succeeding where the traditional offers did not. Mason: Yes, two ways to answer that one is for some problems. They are simply not profitable for a lot of companies even as an example. I major company might spend a hundred thousand to maybe over a billion dollars, maybe multiple millions of dollars. Just writing the proposal to a government agency do some work and it's not at all an exaggeration. You know, that's really not the [00:07:00] case. Where a small mom-and-pop company. But for larger companies, I see a Honeywell or a Boeing or Lockheed or some other defense kind tractor, you know for sure they spend that kind of money. So the and that's the total money. They spend let alone The Profit they might get in that which is maybe on the order of 10% or something. So you got to really want. To do this work to invest the money for a proposal into it and something at the scale of I mentioned Nayak before right the NASA innovated the best huh something that small it's simply not worth large company writing a proposal that they're not going to get there not even get the cost of proposal back probably now there may be other reasons, but let's let's give me those for a second. Let's think about the the other way of answering that question. What am I people who just want to work with NASA? There are people out there that are passionate. About what NASA doesn't and you do you'll be hard pressed by the way to find other government agencies and probably even other businesses with the brand loyalty if you like or their reputation that in Mass it has yeah, so I'll [00:08:00] give you the example of Tom ditto titl was his last name. He's got had a couple of Nyack Awards over the years. The first one was I think in 2005 ish? He had this brilliant idea for a new kind of spectrometer. And for your I know you probably know but not everyone knows this spectrometer is a device that looks at it a light and finds out what colors it is. And I'm looking at the Spectrum of a let's say reflected light off of a rock or something will tell you about its chemical may make up so spectrometers the useful thing for astronomy. Well, Tom didn't came up with the idea of using diffraction grating. It's that that colorful rainbow mirror looking stuff. There was all the rage in the 1970s. So but he had a way of using that to make a spectrometer and he would have been a very long spectrometer. In fact, maybe even on the surface of the Moon a super long kilometers long spectrometer arguably a crazy idea, but absolutely brilliant and solve the problem, but NASA didn't even know it needed to solve. Once against problem [00:09:00] that no Lockheed would propose but a Tom ditto would so Tom just wanted to work on this and he had a passion for it. He solved the problem and that was a cool example, and there's others just like it's so in an environment where you have Innovation where people can. Contribute, I guess I'll stay out of the goodness of their heart or because I like the idea of the challenge or maybe even for relatively small price. You'll get different kinds of solutions and that's an interesting possibility.   What would you do to unlock grassroots innovators?   Ben: how would you encourage that even further? So  say you you control the entire United States government?  what would you do Beyond Nyack anything to sort of unlock those people? Mason: To clarify for your listeners. I have no plans to take over the government. Yes. I'm willing if someone like to offer me the job, but that's not my forte. Well, so again, I let me let me go back to the example of prizes and challenges. This is a big deal with in the Obama Administration. [00:10:00] They were faced with this awkward problem of having lots of great ideas and basically no money to work within a Congress that was not supportive. (Prizes and Challenges) So what do you do? Well, you open up these opportunities to the nation maybe even to the world. So if you can come up with an away with a way of articulating the value of contributing, you know again in a way that makes the public or maybe just a few individuals wants to help. Depend on that altruistic nature that some people have that's when we dissolve a problem because it doesn't work in all cases. So rather than just offering a challenge where if you do it you get a medal. What about offering a prize prize competitions are interesting because first of all the the organization that offers the price doesn't necessarily spend money until they get a result. For example, the the orteig prize remember this one. This was the one that encouraged transatlantic flight. Yes. So, you know that that's one way to go. A $20,000 prize and [00:11:00] then you win it and you pay off your mortgage there have been others. Like I birthed an said that building the gossamer Albatross was away from to pay off his mortgage. And so there are there are some folks who are motivated by the prospect of a prize and again from for the funders perspective from a funding perspective. You're not going to pay until and unless you can get the solution you want. So that's interesting the other interesting feature about crowdsourcing a solution like that is you might get. People applying to solve your problem and you get the best one out of a thousand compare that to a typical again since we're talking Aerospace a typical Aerospace Contracting opportunity. You'll probably get responses that say NASA would offer millions of dollars for a new rocket. You're going to get doesn't maybe responses to that of which a half dozen maybe will be credible and it's going to be The Usual Suspects. It'll be it'll be Boeing and Lockheed and orbital sciences and maybe a few others well. What if that one in a thousand Solutions the one you really want offering an [00:12:00] opportunity that solicits such a large number of potential inputs really allows you to pick that best one the again the 2 Sigma 3 Sigma Solution which is kind of exciting possibility. So that's another way to go.   How do you pull out good ideas when they take resources?     Ben: to Riff on  that how other good ways of. Judging a solution before it requires a large amount of investment. So with this Crown funny I can imagine that it would get a lot of people. With ideas and you'd be able to go through the ideas and if there's one that immediately stands out as better than the rest or  is very clearly feasible often with things. You don't actually know if it's a good idea until you've tested it and you poured some resources into it and people might not have those. So is there any trick to  pulling out those ideas? Mason: One interesting interesting fact [00:13:00] about prize competitions is pretty clearly. You have to pitch it at the right dollar amount, you know after ten bucks, you're not going to get in. This is really what you want a prize where the prize might be the say 20 billion dollars the investment necessary to. That twenty billion dollars might be so prohibitive that you're only going to get a few players and once again, probably the usual suspects right? For instance. Let's say that we offered twenty billion dollars for whoever first built at the hotel on the moon. Okay, it sounds like an interesting idea maybe but to develop that infrastructure that capability is going to cost billions begin with and and maybe someone will win the 20 billion dollar Enterprise, but I really need to get what you want. So first of all the the scale of the prize. Matters, but let me go back to this portfolio idea we were talking about before if you have the freedom to manage a portfolio of Technology investment your opportunity then is to think about those high-risk investments. Just the way you would have to say in your own eventual portfolio think about high risk Investments as a way to pick winners [00:14:00] you invest a little bit the high-risk stuff across the large board and maybe a few of them. But you have to be winners. Well, then maybe you go investible bit more in those and soon as saying the case of Nayak, right? And let's say that we like to Tom Dittos spectrometer so much that the $100,000 that he got for building this which is not peanuts by the way, but it's still small from Aerospace perspective that hundred thousand dollars a small investment. But in a subsequent phase maybe he gets ten times that amount of money maybe he starts a small company. I think he is company something like ditto tool and die company or something like this maybe ditto Tool company gets a factor of 10 or investment in the in a follow-on phase. In fact, maybe even a subsequent phase could be a hundred times as much. So as time goes on as the maturity of the technology increases as you continually refine the portfolio allowing the failed investment to just sort of Fall by the wayside. You can concentrate on those ones that are [00:15:00] successful which is first of all a reason why you have to invest in some high-risk stuff. You got to take some risks right and then second if you. And if you have a portfolio approach you have the opportunity to use statistics to your benefit. I can let's say if I'm NASA invest in a hundred a crazy ideas every year and if only one or two of them pan out, well, that's great those one or two. Probably something I really care about.   How do you incentivize innovation within NASA?   Ben:  that makes a lot of sense and  in that portfolio. So in a in excellent Financial portfolio, you measure success by how much money you get by your return. There's a number and that's you want to maximize that number that you're getting back NASA's portfolio doesn't quite fit into that. So, how do you how do you measure how well a portfolio is doing? How do you incentivize people? To within NASA to really push the best Innovations forward. [00:16:00] Mason: Yeah several things going on there. First of all, you got to take a look at the organization's culture. You have to take a look at how they respond to Innovation. My experience with NASA is that it's full of brilliant and committed people at the same time. There's a tendency for the younger folks to be very forward-looking and interestingly for the most senior leadership be fairly forward-looking somewhere in the middle. There's a like a lot of problem, but it would have a low spot would have us soft spot where people in more than elsewhere can be. (Risk aversion) Careerist that is the not so willing to take risks. They want to keep their jobs. They want to be seen as effective. And again taking on risks can be not looked upon well that in their opinion. So so that's tricky right here these different populations in any large organization and you got to come up with a way of communicating the value of innovation across the board, right? That's one of the challenges making this sort of thing work. Suppose a lot more that you can see about about culture and I [00:17:00] suppose every culture is a little different but one of those the hardest parts in making Innovation stick is to communicate to folks that it's a permanent solution what I found again using NASA's an example, and I've also work with other companies by the way for which this is true. There's a tendency to think that these technology investment initiatives or this Innovation is initiative is just the flavor of the day, you know, it's it's a it's our flash in the pan or whatever metaphor you like. It's a temporary State of Affairs. So there are people who are afraid if they start to go to heavy toward Innovation and man maybe quit their job of doing program management and study to become a radical innovator. That whatever leadership has been pushing that is going to disappear eventually and it'll go back to business as usual and then they'll be left without a job. Right? So there's risk seen in this process of taking an innovation because you not so sure how permanent is going to be. So, you know, how do you Embrace that problem as someone trying to effect change just [00:18:00] promising it's not going to go away probably won't convince folks. They've been around long enough. It's in your organization's happen. They've seen issues come and go how do you convince them? So I wish I had an answer to that other than to say that it's only through longevity of an innovation process that people really start to embrace it and what I'm talking about when I say longevity. I mean really on the order of five plus years you really would like to have almost a generation of folks grow up in an environment where that Innovation is taken to be the order of the day.   Strengths and Weaknesses of each sector   Ben:  something like that. I've I don't have an answer to but that I see consistently is that there are these these timescale mismatches where people's careers are sort of judged in maybe two to five year segments where if you nothing's happened in the past two to five years. People are like well, what are you what are you doing? And then the really the the Innovations take something like. You know seven to 10 years to to really mature so it's very [00:19:00] hard to align those incentives and I'm just always always looking for answers around that. I you mentioned that you've seen this at a bunch of different organizations  you've literally been in every every sector right you've been in Industry. You've been in Academia you've been in government. Do you have any sense of what role each of them should ideally occupy in an innovation ecosystem and what strengths and weaknesses each has. Mason:  That's a wonderful question and probably beyond my Ken but I will I will offer for those of your listeners and you as well who want to go back rewind a little bit to the World War II time frame thinking about this fellow named vannevar Bush and then you've probably encountered thanks to him and his Innovations we have what we have now where [00:20:00] universities take on what we call fundamental research which combines both basic and applied research and then come. The government take on the next step which is implementation in to say potentially demonstration or something operational system. This is at least the way it's shaking out maybe the original town with a bit different but that's kind of how it shakes it out and people are fond of pointing to this Gap or this where they call it the. This Chasm between the Innovation that happens in universities and then the need for near term profit making investments in companies or low-risk politically safe Investments of the level of the government. There's a gap in their right and how do you feel that Gap? There are organizations like DARPA the defense Advanced research projects agency that are meant to fill that Gap and their NASA. We try creating programs that would fill that Gap and not surprisingly. There are there are still problems with that. So. We think of universities think of companies think of government that are clearly different motivations that drive each one of these. [00:21:00] I wonder if there isn't a different motivation entirely that might be more Global more Universal at the moment. We don't have it if we were ever. Oh, I don't know set upon by an alien horde we might pull together as a as a nation as a world and in all contribute a little bit differently to the way things are going but at the moment without any obvious. I'm cataclysm on the horizon and some might argue about climate change for the say we don't all agree that there's a cataclysm on Horizon. We're in these silos. So universities we innovate in a certain way. We innovate at the level of again. I'll call it basic and applied research. The government innovated the level when it works. Well policy when it doesn't work. Well the government tries to solve its own problems using its own expertise really really in my opinion. They should be going outside for that expertise and businesses solve problems in a way that maximizes shareholder value probably in the relatively near term. These are all I mean perfectly successful ways of pulling on [00:22:00] Innovation, but they're not the same. And they do lead to very idiosyncratic Solutions. Again. The question is isn't there something more General and broader. What do you think?   What's the correct system?   Ben: I would have I think I mean, I definitely you're the one being interviewed but I think that there's you've completely identified that Gap and I think that in my mind there's what it should really be is. Sort of a pipeline and that looking at what needs to be done and who is best incentivised to do it. So for example, the. It's stuff where there's this very long long time Horizon uncertain outcomes sort of like big our research would come from universities with some light support from the government. But then as soon as that needed to be pulled together into something that required a lot of [00:23:00] coordination and a lot of money then perhaps the government or a company would come in depending on. What the real outcome would be but you know if I had a real and like the whole point of all of this is to try to figure out a real answer. I don't have a good one at the moment. (Shift in funding methods) Mason: Yes, happy birthday thinking about this other thing. I guess I could offer is the way we fund research in this country has as changed over the years there was a time and it might surprise some of your listeners to think about this there was a time when as a university researcher. You probably didn't write any Grant proposals or if you did it was one every few years. These days most people in say my position where I'm working at a well-regarded research-intensive university. I write 10 to 20 individual research proposals a year of which a small faction or funded is probably less than 10% or funded. And I think I'm actually doing pretty [00:24:00] well frankly for that ten percent. There are folks who go years without getting any of proposal from the despite submitting hundreds of Grant proposals for the amount of time involved in writing these proposals. It's worse and worse every year the money gets Tighter and Tighter and you know, what do you do one answer is that we've. We've morphed toward this model and maybe it's not what we all want what we have right now in a previous age where the government more directly supported universities where research was done regardless of funding you got different outcomes, but that was a relatively short period of time in our in our history. If you go back a little farther this a 19th century before for the most part research was done either by the independently wealthy or by people with some kind of philanthropic back. You know the prince of some new name your favorite to European potentate, the I the prince of whatever would would fund your research into discovering new molecules. And that was just the way it worked. Yeah. So these models have changed [00:25:00] radically over the years and interesting question is where this might go if in fact something like crowdsourcing or. The ubiquity of information and access to it through the internet really matures to inform how we do research. I do not know what the future holds. I know you've been thinking about the sorts of things in the past. Yeah, but it's interesting question. But what this looks like what the research infrastructure or ecosystem looks like when we can vote up or down a good research projects. Or maybe when crowdfunding can be the basis for what research gets undertaken may not be good. But it's another way to do it.   How good is crowdfunding   Ben: Would you trust a large population of people to be able to. Would you trust them to allocate research dollars?  I ask this based on the fact that you see a lot of these articles shouting an outrage that the government is funding someone to I don't know like walk around [00:26:00] and look at snails or something ridiculous. But then you could make the argument that  well you look at snails enough and then you find this one snail that has some chemical compound that then could be synthesized into medicine.  So would you trust crowdfunding? What would that get become Mason:  I probably wouldn't trust them as far as I can throw them. I guessed another way to think about it is there are I probably would not trust the crowd to vote for one thing. I might be trust them statistically if we could fund many things out of such a population and that's where again the benefit of large numbers comes in. I even though I think that the public generally might get some things wrong from time to time and maybe somewhat credulous and believe strange things on the whole they're strangely predictive. I'll give you another quick story about that please years ago was probably 10 years ago DARPA had this interesting idea. Don't remember exactly who DARPA but isn't. [00:27:00] Dandiya, if you look at how crowd Source information works, it seems surprisingly accurate and predictive. So what if we created a stock market for terrorist attacks, and we had people as actually placed bets on but you know invest in Futures, but. Terrorist attract attack Futures the the outcome would be people voting to maximize their return on their Investments would use all that work release or most information that we know is out there and would identify the most likely terrorist outcomes of those terrorists outcomes associated with say that again that are continually Rising stock something out there. Is motivating people to think that that's like the outcome now to issues, of course number one is incredibly crass and in extremely poor taste to defy such a thing [00:28:00] and. And Interpol was I think a little tone deaf, you know offering that as a project because it was very quickly jumped on by the me. Yeah. I can't believe how horrible these people are really thinking but they're not wrong in that the right kind of crowdsourcing can in fact the almost prescient almost almost. Telepathic or psychic in its ability to predict some things but not all things and that's where I say. You want to have a managed portfolio of this stuff. So every now and then maybe more often than not the crowd will be wrong. But if you give them the chance to run lots of different things, you'll both encourage A diversity of opinion which leads to different kinds of solutions now, that's a good thing and probably a statistical. Draping over all the different possibilities so that eventually the right answer can come out. So I think those two ingredients probably could make it work, but I'm very speculative about this right now. And again the DARPA stories interesting cautionary tale because as soon as that became public it just that went away in a [00:29:00] hurry.   What happened to grants?   Ben:   just to go back you mentioned that until recently people do University Research  only had to write one Grant every few years was that because the great sizes were much larger. Were they getting money from outside sources? Why was that? What changed? Mason: Yeah, that's interesting cause and effect will bit muddled and you can find other people probably better explain this history. But my quick version is something like this the kinds of research that we're done in the University's the kind of research was much more skewed toward the basic end of things pencil and paper theoretical development. And also the let's just be frank we knew less than we know now. So coming up with new stuff is a larger maybe than it was before I know if that's fair but I think that's just some research part of it. Yeah. So well there there you go. So first of all, we were solving different problems right now though. We are taking on a lot of the problems that actually you to be done in Industry. The famous example, of course is Bell [00:30:00] Labs right out of which the transistor came these days. The transistor will be developed within University and to develop a transistor or something analogous to it requires significant infrastructure Investments, not just pencil and paper. So even though the theory behind some conductors came out of University the actual practice of it came out of bell labs and there have been plenty of other examples like this. So I think actually industry has skewed away from doing research. Although there's a bit of emotion back toward it now, but it's nowhere what it used to be and then necessarily universities have taken a non not out of a sense of obligation, but rather because it's you know, there's a void and they rush to fill. But to fill it we need more money. So where does the money come from either comes from profit centers or come from the government with the government reducing tax income and also research investments in trouble for the 1980s. Now there's a new kind of Gap. It's the research Gap. So for the most part Industries not doing it and when University does do it. [00:31:00] It's spending a lot of a server for just bringing the funding. Got it. So you'd also argue probably that the universities are you not the best place for this to be done? You know, there is a lot of my opinion a lot of value in companies developing intellectual property. They keep it to themselves. They can make a profit on it. That's a huge motivator. What we do need a verse These almost exclusively is open. We publish it and basically anyone can pick it up and use it.   What do you think of breakthrough starshot and philanthropy?   Ben:  that makes a lot of sense. You also mentioned that  farther in the past a lot. There was a lot of funding that was being done by wealthy individuals and you're an advisor for breakthrough starshot. I believe which as far as I can tell is almost entirely bankrolled by wealthy individuals it seems like. Breakthrough starshot is sort of something that in the past. We would have expected NASA to do. Do you think that what do you what do you think about this [00:32:00] shift? Do you think that the wealthy individuals are going to start filling in that Gap where the pros and cons there? Mason: Well, first of all, I think that's a lot of what think it's a fact a lot of wealthy people certainly in the US have been filling that Gap. They have been funding a lot of research more than in the past. The the cliche is you start your computer. Can you sell it you make a billion dollars in new investment with that you really care about which is space exploration and that that that pattern has been repeated over and over Elon Musk for sure. Jeff Bezos for blue origin and there's been plenty of examples of this so, I don't know maybe maybe it's more than just a cliche. But anyway the going back to this question of will private individual Step Up. We have to an extent but they all have a certain something in it for [00:33:00] themselves that that was always the case has always been the case for privately funded science. Remember there are foundations. Now that still do fund Sciences. There's not as much there used to be but there are still these foundations, right? So the question is what kind of science do you get when you have a billionaire from to your. There's always going to be some idiosyncrasy associated with it and what we can take the Breakthrough starshot project as an example. Personally. I think it's a fantastic project. And for those of you who don't know the Breakthrough starshot project consists of coming up with a 20-year plan to build a spacecraft that could launch again in 20 years and take maybe 20 years to reach the closest star Proxima Centauri or maybe Alpha Centauri with the goal of returning some science data. Another three or four years after that depending on the light travel time. So that's a long duration project meets almost at the scale of a medieval Cathedral. I doubt that many of us on The Advisory Board will even [00:34:00] be alive to see that data come back if it ever does so it's not dangerous undertaking. It probably makes sense for that reason for it to be privately funded or funded by something like, you know a church, but these days the church does not fund science that way so it's not not a critique, but it's just it doesn't do that. Yeah, the way that they may be used to fund building Cathedrals. So these large projects like Cathedrals or Starships probably deserve a special kind of funding one thing I've discovered about em, it's not my own Discovery plenty of other people know this as well. I was just late to realizing it. Congress wants to fund things that they can take credit for okay, so it's going to be 2 4 or 6 years time frame at most where they want to see a return on their investment their investment being stepping up to be sure that some product project is funded. But so that's their return on investment timeframe and industries return on investment time frames in the sale of months. It takes [00:35:00] something like a billionaire or some other kind of philanthropic effort to fund a project that is longer than a few years. So if we really have aspirations that lie along this axis this temporal axis that makes us want to get a result in decades from now. We're going to have to look for funding source. That is not something governmental throughly not up to Industry. So I think there's a place for private investment for foundations or philanthropic. God is definitely that kind of thing so that you're not going to get funded by you know, the Air Force. Let's say or by orbital Sciences Corporation of Northrop Grumman Corporation,   Concerns about philanthropic time scales   Ben:  one concern that I always have about.  Philanthropic efforts is as you said there has to be something in it for people and when you're not able to get sort of a return on investment that's in money. Sometimes I've seen people be less patient because they [00:36:00] want to see progress on on a shorter time  scale. Do you do worry about that at all? Mason: Well, you know as I said, there's always this risk if you have a single investor, let's say again some billionaire to be named later that he or she will pull out the funding based on some whim they decide rather than funding a Starship that rather fun to the purchase of a massive sculpture massive bronze bust of him or herself to be placed in his front yard. Who knows? Yeah, and I'm not speaking about Yuri Milner here. Let me say for my few interactions of him. He seems like a legitimately. Two passionate scientist you really does care about knowledge for the sake of humanity. But it's also clear that he wants to be known as the person who successfully they support this work and things nothing wrong with that. So just like other examples the past of philanthropic contributions. You you probably want your name attached to these discoveries and that's again, that's fine [00:37:00] with me.   Experience With Different Organizations   Ben: and  shifting gears a little bit. You've had your research funded by many different organizations both inside the government and in Private Industry. Have you had different experiences with that? And  which ones are your favorite or what did your favorite ones do and what is your least favorite ones do? Mason: So that's a long story. So I'm gonna give you an answer which sounds like I'm itself said during and that maybe that's correct. The answer is when you get left alone to do the job. It works really well. Now I totally understand that if let's say I'm a member of a government organization or industry. I need to feel that my money is being well spent I want to check in and I don't want to end up with a yoyodyne propulsion systems. If you remember the movie Buckaroo Banzai, you don't want that kind of contractor gone amok kind of phenomenon. I get that [00:38:00] at the same time too much micromanagement sort of defeats the purpose of doing fundamental research. You know, the whole idea is we don't have a thing yet. We need to create that thing and that Act of Creation is not something you can exactly legislator specify the requirements. So I'm a little uneasy at of the idea about the idea that very tight control over the act of invention is going to give you a good result at the same time. Yeah, you need to be responsible stewards of whatever money you're using to fund Sky research. So I see where that comes comes from. I don't want to give a specific example that's going to get me in trouble with the essential functions, but I will say it government agency a government agency collaborating with us on a project. The project involved a few technological innovations after we scoped out the project with this government agency, the the folks involved at the government agency and supervising our work decided that work was so cool. They want to do it themselves. So they went ahead and try to make themselves removing. [00:39:00] Most of what I viewed as the really Innovative parts of the work leaving us with some fairly wrote tasks which there were still paying for. So, I guess I'm kind of glad to take the money but. Then the problem was because he's relatively unimaginative tasks the government agency decided it would be very helpful for us to be very tightly supervised to do these simple tasks. They were very good at and that led to a lot of in my opinion wasted money on things some example for this example is we were building an object out of some official part. Some of you can find at a hardware store, right? The reason we were doing so is because those parts a lot of design margin that is to say you could you can pressurize them or you could add electricity or whatever it was and the parts would not fail. They were made for Consumer use their super safe and excessively over design and it which is great actually very safe. But the sponsor wanted us to do value in [00:40:00] all these with a super detailed analysis using what's known as finite element analysis element analysis where you break it into little mathematical chunks and put in the computer. They wanted us to test it. They want to do all sorts of things for parts. You could buy at the hardware store which you buy every day without thinking about because they're super safe because they're built that way that was a ton of a waste of time. So so that was a very negative experience I think. II chalk it up to my naive tank and working with that sponsor. I now know what kind of work to specify for that sponsor at the same time. It was not going to be a relationship of whatever worked. Well for what it's worth. We took that project and we're doing ourselves now and we've made more progress in the last. Two years that we did in the two years previous where they were helping us. I guess we'll call it. So I'm glad to say that research is doing well now but it's only because we have a few resources internally that we can use to spend on the stuff. I'd rather not end on a cynical no Opera offer positive [00:41:00] version this case so the positive version and I will create the big breakthrough starshot with this positive version of those of us working on The Advisory Board. Sometimes get some funding. From the the foundation to see what that will really pay for a service but with that money I can do lots of cool stuff. So I've been able to turn a few students to we're solving some problems of interest of breakthrough starshot it when we've got some great results. It doesn't actually take that much as long as we have the researchers have some freedom to pursue the work on our own terms. So if there's a lesson there it's something along the lines of you need a light touch. Normal gostin, the former CEO of Lockheed said the best way he's ever found to manage people this pick the right folks be clear about what you want and then get out of their way. Yeah, and that's that's lucky to that's not just some pie-in-the-sky academic like me saying that so there's something to this in the lesson learned again is to have a light touch   How do you change the 10 year goals 8 year political cycle mismatch?   Ben: excellent. And then  going back to [00:42:00] NASA briefly while I was working with you. I saw consistently that the executive branch would set tenure goals, but then. For political reasons those goals would change at most every eight years. And so you get this  progress towards this 10-year goals and then it would change. Do you see any way to change that sort of unfortunate situation? Mason: Well, there have been wasted proposed for example for NASA again since I know that example really well, it has been proposed even in this most recent Congress that NASA should be funded on a 10-year time frame and the idea would be that a a congress whatever the hundred and some odd Congress whatever it is would set the budget for NASA appropriate the funds and get out of the way. So the idea is that again once a decade, maybe you would check in and change the objectives. So this is I think most people recognize that the best way to run these long-term [00:43:00] projects. If you keep changing course every two to six or eight years, you just have chaos. This is one of the main reasons why things like the James Webb Space Telescope the International Space Station space shuttle, these all have given mass of the reputation of going over budget. But I have to defend NASA in this case because NASA really is able to defend itself on the spaces. It's not NASA. Okay, it's Congress if you have a project. That is complicated and takes a long time. There's a natural funding profile that goes with this. It's a little bit at first while you get your feet under you and then there's a big lump in the middle and that tails off toward the end. This is standard funding profile. But NASA's budget from Congress is flat. So you end up very inefficiently smearing this money across a very long time which makes things inefficient expensive things. Don't go. Well, you lose good people along the way and you end up spending more in the long. This story has been told over and over again and Congress. They're smart people. Well, actually you may not think so, but they are [00:44:00] in my experience. They know what they're doing and they know that they're going to trade off between the right answer and the politically expedient answer the politically expedient answer is as long as they can be seen to having their finger on the button for NASA there there there folks will vote for them. So you understand that's what motivates them. So I would say if there's a way to make this work. Well, it's something like. Come up with a way for they can where they can get credit for things are working. Well without necessarily having to change what's going on. Yeah, and I don't have an answer probably make that work if that were possible that makes a lot of sense.   What's the best way to make the world that has never been today?   Ben: So I realize we're coming up on time. One of the the last things I want to ask you about was that  some things that people might not have guessed about you is that you have a master's in English because. As your bio states that you thought that that was the way to make the world that has never been its by inspiring people with writing [00:45:00] and then you change track completely and well not completely but you figured out that engineering was sort of the best the best way to do that. Now, what what do you think? Do you still think that  what you think the best way to enable the world that has never been? In  today's here. And now Mason:  I like the way you're asking that question it recalls that quote from Theodore Von Karman, right distinction between science engineering scientists create the world's or huh, scientists discover the world that is Engineers create the world that never was it's not exactly a way of claiming that Engineers are better than scientist. Is that really what it's about is about distinguishing between these two impulses. We have discovering the unknown and creating. What doesn't exist in my opinion both contribute to improving our lot as humans, so there's a place for both in a reason to have both let's not confuse one with the other. I have always been about creating things. I [00:46:00] suppose I get this from my parents. My dad's a writer. My mom has created many things over the years. She was an artist. She has been a an actress and a brilliant Coco to restaurant. She's a very much a polymath when it comes to things of all. So I probably get this from them at some level but I've always taken not to be one of the the Essential Elements of what it is to be human is to create to lie. If your impact on the world in a positive way at least an impact at all and positive is my choice. Okay suppose people choose to do negative things. So what I'm saying is that that impulse is always been part of what matters to me. When I was a young naive person, I thought I could have that impact through English literature. I still interested in this I still interested in writing and reading and I respect people who can make a career out us for a thing, but it wasn't what I was good at. So instead I felt like aerospace engineering particularly offered me the opportunity to [00:47:00] solve problems that haven't been solved and to make an impact that I felt like making. So I guess over the years I've discovered there are definitely different ways of looking at the world one of the most the way that I look at it another one of the ways that people get the world is what's the safest way I can keep my job and not get fired. And those are very different impulses and and look I recognize that my perspective here maybe comes across as I don't know what to elitist or entitled or first world or something where I'm saying that it's great to have the freedom to create and make an impact on the world. I see I clearly tightly to that value. At the same time, I recognize that not everybody has that opportunity. Sometimes you just gotta make do you got to do what you can keep your family fed? Keep your shoes on your feet and you don't have the freedom the luxury of being able to do everything exactly the way you want it. So I recognize I'm very fortunate in my career my life. So I do not in any way put down people who haven't got the bandwidth simply to set assignments sided set aside time to create. [00:48:00] But that is what matters to me and I'm very fortunate that I have a job that allows me to do that. Yeah, well said.   Final Statements?   Ben: So I do realize we're over time this was  amazing by the way, so I just want to make sure that I there's any points that I didn't hit on absolutely want to give you a chance to talk about that. Mason: Well, I'm so glad that your interest in this question. How do we innovate? I will offer that when government works. Well, it enables people whatever works while it enables people to do their best in the service of our nation. Let's say when it doesn't work. Well it tries to prescribe to micro manage to get in the way so I am far from being an anti. It's very kind of person that I hope it doesn't come across. I think the right policies are essential. I mean policy you can look at is the software of our [00:49:00] lives here in an innovation when that software is written correctly the rules that we follow and we choose to follow they enable us to be successful when the software is not right everything falls apart. So, you know, I actually would not be averse to turning over some policy making the software Engineers because I think they have a sense of how to write good software and lawyers when they do their job. Well, you know that works out well too. Yeah, but unfortunately to be a software engineer and to affect society requires some additional kind of tranny. So if I want to close with a comment, it would be something along the lines of that. I don't see that much of a distinction in what people are capable of whether it's mathematics. Or history or philosophy or art or technology or science? These are all in my mind forms of the same thing. There are things of which we are all capable. I suppose there's some sabanci there who can do multi-digit multiplication in their heads, but I'm not interested in that because I have a computer. [00:50:00] So instead I take that multidisciplinary capability. We all have and my opinion were born with as a sign that. We shouldn't feel limited by what we think we're good at or not. And so those of you interested in creating an innovating don't feel that you are limited by what your label is if you're labeled as a software engineer, maybe policy is the right thing for you if your if your label Les a lawyer maybe you should think about going into space technology. I don't know. What I'm trying to say is that there's there's a lot of freedom that we all have for pursuing good ideas and we should take. Advantage of our rare position here at the beginning of the 21st century where we have these tools. We still have the resources. We wish to create we have this one chance. I think to make make our work right? Outro We got a lot out of this conversation. Here are some of my top takeaways. If you have an organization full of smart motivated people that doesn't produce great results. If all the incentives are set up to avoid [00:51:00] risk, there's been a shift in where different parts of the Innovation pipeline happen more is shifted to universities and startups away from larger companies and government but the systems of support having caught up to that change. Finally taking a portfolio approach to technology and Innovation is a powerful concept that we don't think about it enough. I hope you enjoyed that you'd like to reach out. You can find me on Twitter under app and Reinhart and I deeply appreciate any feedback you might have. Thank you.  

We all get down or feel down. That is natural. We should focus on and remember things that lift us back up and make us feel good. What in your life lifts you up? Try to spend more time focusing on that. (Filter: Take a Picture, playing my guitar, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) If you like the show, please check out our Official Morning Mindset Merchandise! Episode Transcription [INTRO] ♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫ *Alex* Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel. *Professor Paul* Hello and welcome back to Morning Mindset, I got it right that time. That's right. I am your host Paul Markel. Thank you, once again for joining me for this show for sharing this with other people for leaving comments on your favorite podcast application. Whatever that happens to be today. We're going to talk about what lifts you up. We all get down. We all feel down at certain times we go through highs and lows in our lives. That's what life is all about. That's natural.-But what we need to focus on is not so much the things that get us down or when we do get down when we feel low when we feel bummed out when we feel like we don't want to get out of bed or we don't want to do anything, what have you. Need to focus on things that lift us up? What lifts you up? What makes you feel good? Put you back on your feet, again, Julie Andrews. She sung are saying about it in The Sound of Music.-That's right, it was called favorite things and you older people understand this and you know these younger people are like, what is he talking about raindrops on roses and Whispers on whiskers on kittens, not Whispers and warm woolen mittens. Those are a few of her favorite things when the dog bites when the bee stings when she's feeling sad. She simply remembers her favorite things and then she doesn't feel so bad. That's an actually a concept that's pretty old. But how often do we think about that?-How often when you're feeling down when you get down when you just win the blues have taken a hold of you. Do you have a plan in place to bring you out of it? Or do you just kind of float along? I know I've been guilty of this. Sometimes I've gotten down or felt like, you know, what's the point and I don't have a plan or I didn't put a plan into action. What I want you guys to do is I want you to think about that now it's easy to feel good when everything is going well course, it's natural when you encounter something that makes you, legitimately, seriously just it uplifts you.- It makes you feel good. I don't know what it is, it could be a song. It could be a picture that you look at it could be an episode of a television show. They're the office is a classic American television show. I know it was British first, but no one cares about that. There are certain episodes of the I like the office. It's been off the air for a while now, but it's still available on Netflix and there are certain episodes of the television show The Office that actually just make me feel good. There are certain songs that just instantly it's like an adrenaline rush. It's like a stiff drink or what have you makes me feel good. For instance. The band filter has a song called take a picture. That when I listen to that song it instantly lifts me up.-They're older songs that lift me up. For instance. I talked yesterday about Stairway to Heaven Sarah to have an instantly lift me up because it transforms me back to where I was at the time and I think about that that makes me feel good. Playing my guitar as I said before I'm not I don't claim to be a musician by any stretch of the imagination and I don't play for other people, but when I have the opportunity I sit down by myself, and I play and I don't think about other things. That's the great thing. That's the greatest thing about musical instruments is that when you're focusing on the instrument itself and focusing on trying to hit the right chords and hit the right strings and all of that stuff.-When you're focusing on that, you're not focusing on anything else. You're not focusing on what's got you down or depressed or angry or frustrated or what have you when I'm playing my guitar. I don't think about what's on Facebook or social media or anything as think about the good stuff. What lifts you up? Maybe it's a passage that you have read or a poem or a song or what have you something that I when I if I'm feeling depressed or if I'm feeling like extremely frustrated. I guess. I like to read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. If you guys don't know what Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, it was actually turned into a song many many years ago.- But it's a time for everything and it explains an ecclesiastic that includes you a sees that as humans who inhabit this Earth. There's not only time for happiness. There's also time for sadness. There's not a time for us, for death, but for birth. Birth and death happiness and sadness peace and War there's a time for all things under heaven and when I read that, I reread it. I'm in a pretty much have it memorized by now, but I'll go back and I'll read it. It makes things and puts things into perspective. Sometimes we just need some perspective in our life.-Sometimes when we get down or feeling down or we're bummed out, we just need something to kick-start us to give us that little bit of perspective to make things seem like they're not all that bad. Just like Julie Andrews song sang about or something about what is the correct pronunciation is she sing. She sang she sung. My English professors. I hope they're not listening to this right now. But so. What I want you guys to do when you're feeling good when you're feeling up when you're feeling upbeat and you encounter something and there may be things that you've never thought about. You know, what I forgot about that song Or that passage or that book or that show or whatever set yourself a plan.-Set up a defense mechanism or a defense plan create your own defensive plan against the blues that sometimes we all need to sing the blues and sometimes singing the blues is just part of life and I understand that you know, that's something that Darryl taught Michael singing the blues is sometimes part of life. There's an office joke for you guys for those who get it, Congratulations.-If you don't don't know what to tell you. So what lifts you up and when you find something that lifts you up make a mental note of it so that the next time you need to enact your your plan your defensive plan against the blues you can go and do that thing, and appreciate that thing for what it is whether it's a song whether it's a passage whether it's a book whether it's a musical instrument, whatever it is, maybe it's just petting your dog.- I don't know but think about that consider what it is in your life that lifts you up. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I have for you today. Thank you. Once again for being a part of the Morning Mindset audience. I hope you're enjoying it. I hope you're sharing it with others. Don't be greedy. Don't be greedy. Share this show with other people. I'm sure that there's at least one person that you know, that would get something out of this show, and if you'd like to leave us a message or write us a letter or what have you go to MorningMindsetPodcast.com and you can do that, and if you'd like to get a copy of the book it's available on Amazon, or you can get signed copies from our website. All right, that's it. That's all I have for you guys today Merry Christmas. Happy New Year, and I will talk to you again real soon. [OUTRO] ♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫ *Alex* Thank you for spending time with us today. To get show notes, submit a topic request, for more from your host Paul G. Markel, visit MorningMindsetPodcast.com. That’s MorningMindsetPodcast.com. Please leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player, we appreciate your time & effort, and we look forward to reading your honest feedback.

Janelle Hardy is a dancer, artist, and writer who teaches the Art of Personal Mythmaking, a transformational memoir-writing program. She loves weaving embodiment prompts together with creativity and ancient tales (like fairytales/ myths/ folklore/ etc) as a way of supporting growth and healing. This interview features a 7-minute guided visualization to unblock creativity by tapping into the body. GUEST LINKS - JANELLE HARDY janellehardy.com The Art of Personal Mythmaking Outline Your Memoir free workshop HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Janelle: So this is a really round-about sort of story because I didn't really know when I started teaching the work that I do, that it was actually about memoir-writing. I'll leave you with that statement and then circle back to it again. Slade: Okay. Janelle: I'm from the far north of Canada. The far north-west, which is the Yukon Territory, and for context for people that aren't Canadian (even some Canadians don't know where I'm from). It's beside Alaska and above British Columbia. It's beautiful. It's so wild. I'm not living there now, but I talk about it because I feel so connected to that place. I'm also from a family... I think I have a common experience to a lot of people in North America and in colonized countries where my ancestry, you know, I'd be considered white, but my ancestry is varied and mostly unknown. There were some family secrets that were whispered as I was growing up. That experience of growing up really attached to a landscape. And then learning that my roots in that landscape are only as deep as my grandparents having moved up there and met each other and settled down there, and wondering, Who am I? Where did I come from? And then struggling with some health challenges that didn't feel like they belonged to me really kind of pitched me on this path of curiosity and inquiry and kind of roaming all over the place in terms of what I studied and where I lived. So... See, this is the trouble with collecting my thoughts around all of my offshoots of interest, which, for a long time, really mystified me. I was really into painting. I was also really into writing. I was also really into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I also wanted to live in other cultures, so I was an exchange student to Japan and to Russia and to another part of Canada, Ontario, which doesn't really sound like being an exchange student, but the Yukon is really different than southern Canada, in terms of lifestyle and how people think about themselves and their relation to the country that they're in. For example, in the Yukon, we refer to 'going outside' as leaving the Yukon to the rest of Canada, or outsiders coming to the Yukon, right? So there's a real strong identity wrapped up in being a Yukoner. And then, the other part of my realization was, I feel this intense claim to being a Yukoner to being part of this world, and it actually doesn't belong to me. There's a history of First Nations people there that is thousands of years old and is being erased and denied. So how can I reconcile my love and longing for this place with the understanding that my roots don't originate there and I don't get to claim it as only my own. All of these curiosities and wonderings pushed me out to study and travel and do all sorts of things, including becoming a single mother at 23 and having chronic fatigue. Throughout all that time, the one thing that kept me steady was a creative practice. And it didn't matter what the creative practice was. I'm a really big believer in creative energy and the life force, that kind of erotic creative life force that's in all of us. When it's in flow, we get to choose the medium that suits what we're trying to express best. And for some people, they just latch on to the one medium and they're a writer and that's all they are. Entirely. For other people, it's kind of peripatetic and maybe a bit dilettantish. Sometimes I've labelled myself as not being able to commit to something, but I've let go of that label and realized that I have the ability and desire to use different mediums to explore different facets of my creative energy, depending on what it is that's wanting to come through. So I might go through a phase of dance and choreography, which happened a lot in my mid-20s. That's a time when I earned a masters degree in dance. And then I really got into painting. And then I got a horrible creative block for years, where I had all the ideas and I actually couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't... It was so painful. It was so painful, this state. But it also taught me a lot. So I felt the bubbling force of my creative desiring, creative energy, and I had all the ideas and I encountered my own resistance and procrastination, no matter where I went. During that time, some of the jobs I was doing involved writing for a local coming events magazine and a couple of national magazines. What I noticed was, while I really enjoyed it, and for some reason was able to write about things when I was being paid, although the pay was terrible, but I was able to do the task when I set the intention outside of myself. And then I also became really angry that I couldn't prioritize my own desire for creative expression enough that I could work on my own projects during that time. I was only able to do it if it had a functional function in society, which was making some money and being of service to an employer. So all of that to say, most of my writing has always been creative non-fiction. It's almost never fiction or fantasy or imagined stories in that way. It's always been about finding a way to share an experience I've had in the world, either my own personal experience in order to understand myself, or, in the case of when I was writing these profiles on artists that were coming to perform in the Yukon, interviewing them and being able to describe their personality, physicality, art and the venue in a way that would invite people in. Slade: It's kind of freaking me out how much you're really speaking to me in this moment. I've been working a lot with issues around the struggle that I have, writing fiction, versus all of the prolific amount of stuff that I put out into the world around my paranormal memoirs, and Shift Your Spirits, and these interviews. And I can write articles. I can write blog posts. I can write for this audience because, like you said, it's sort of my job and there's something very liberating, weirdly, about, it's an official thing and I have to do it every week. I didn't even really think of it in terms of the blocks that I have around my novels as being particularly about something attached to, Oh it's just this thing that I'm making for myself that doesn't have this official, sanctioned place to be in the world. It's not being asked for by other people. It's something that I'm bringing through for myself. And it was really interesting. I don't remember the exact words of how you said that, but I thought, Oh! I get that. I understand that. That's a piece of the puzzle for me. So the wild synchronicity is that you and I are here, speaking for the very first time ever, and we're having this conversation. And I had just told you before we started recording that I have had an energy healing session, a clearing, around creative blocks. And I've also been to a chiropractor and a massage therapist yesterday, because there's a physical manifestation in my neck, like nerve impingement and my spine and neck. You... Something I want to say really quick and then I want to bring you back to this idea of blocks and how they're related to the body, but I wanted to say, when you were talking about your journey and how hard it was for you to sort of justify the idea of committing to one form of creative expression, one of the things that was a real turning point for me in my life was when I accepted the fact that I couldn't choose and I didn't have to. And that I would be all of those things together, and that's just what my path was. That, you know, I am an intuitive, and a novelist, and a interviewer voice talent. You know? Whatever! I am all of those things and I think most creative people are really eclectic. And sometimes the things that... And this is something I've been talking about a lot with clearing creative blocks. There is a purpose that you choose for yourself and then there's sometimes a purpose that's chosen for you by the world. And I feel like, as creative people, sometimes it's that hit song, it's that one performance that you did. It's that one job that you landed that just was the right place at the right time. And maybe you become known for that one thing. And people ask that and expect that of you. It becomes this identifying thing that YOU didn't necessarily choose as much as IT chose YOU. So it makes perfect sense to me why you're all those things. And knowing that you work with creativity and writing and mythmaking, and that you talk to me about how you work through creative blocks through the body, makes complete sense to me. That you're a dancer. It really is the intersection of all those things, right? It's you being a little bit of everything that you are. At least to me, in this moment, it's what you represent. To get back to this idea of the creative block and how it's connected to the body, talk to me about, first of all, when you were really blocked, what you discovered set you free. And then how you've learned to guide other people through that. Janelle: Okay. That's a really good question. My answer won't apply to everyone, but I think there's a lot of useful tools people listening can get out of my misery. Slade: Yeah! Absolutely. Janelle: Being creatively blocked as a creative person, number one, I think it actually makes us sick. Because it takes a lot of effort to shut the flow down. Being in the flow and having energetic as well as physical movement as a constant experience is actually our natural state. But we live in cultures, and by saying 'we', I'm kind of speaking to the experience I grew up in, being in North America, in an English-speaking culture colonized originally by England, and Canada, still being governed by England, tenuously. So we have a cultural inheritance that is really damaging. And the cultural inheritance is the idea of productivity being important in service of capitalism, of making money, of being an employee to someone else, having skills that someone else wants to pay to make money off of you for. We also have an inheritance of domination and we carry with us... And this is most intensely felt for people of European white ancestry, but anyone of colour growing up in a culture like this also receives these unspoken rules and values as well. We grow up learning that self-control involves contraction, tightening and dominating. Ownership of our body and our emotions and our inner state. We grow up understanding that what is considered attractive and valuable and wonderful in our culture is really limited. And if we don't fit, we need to feel shame and try to improve ourselves. Can you kind of get a sense that all of these non-verbal values that we grow up with involves tightening and shrinking and contracting and shutting down, in order to be okay, or be acceptable? Slade: Umhmm. Janelle: So with this kind of cultural inheritance, as well as a lack of deep grounding and roots, most of the cultures living in the Americas of all backgrounds no longer speak their indigenous languages. My ancestry's not English. It's quite a mix, but Scottish people never spoke English. Welsh people never spoke English. Arcadians never spoke English. There's a small bit of First Nations in my ancestry from Quebec and Canada. They were not English-speaking cultures. When language is lost, we also lose a great deal. We lose music, we lose language. We lose a connection to our roots. And then all we have to grasp onto, and we lose our stories. All we have to grasp onto is this very one-dimensional colonizer culture that really profits a lot off of teaching shame and shrinking us. The way that that relates to creative blocks, I think, is that it's really hard to be in flow if you feel like you're not good enough in any way. What some people do is, they figure out compensations around the tightening and the contracting and the shrinking. But then what happens is the creative flow comes and goes in 'bursts of inspiration' and flashes of insight and really intense, forceful rush of creativity that people get, afraid of not jumping in and staying up all night, buzzing away with it, because if it goes away, when will it come back? It might be three more years, right? We have all these ideas about our inherent creative flow that are warped by a constant experience of being taught to shut down and contract and deny that flow. In our bodies, we really feel it through tightening, through physical tension, even though most people in North America live very sedentary lives, there's actually no reason, if someone is doing a lot of sitting or desk work, to feel as tense as they do. As a bodyworker, I've spent 12 years working on peoples' bodies hands-on, it's astonishing how much tension there is in people that actually don't use their bodies. Part of it is related to this idea that we need to make an effort. We have to be appearing to be working hard. We have to be tightening up just in case... It becomes internalized. 'If anyone looks at me, I'm clearly a hard worker because I appear that way because my brows are furrowed while I tense my shoulders and type.' Or whatever it is. Slade: Right. Look busy. Janelle: Yeah. Looking busy. Busy making... That's a whole other tangent of how much energy gets devoted to making ourselves appear to be busy rather than just using our precious energy to create and do the work with ease, right? Back to getting creatively blocked, these are all things I've figured out as I've done a lot of healing work, offered it as well as received it. And had the excruciating experience of being blocked. Being blocked, the flow was locked up but it's like it's boiling away inside. The other things that really stopped me from just creating were perfectionism, this idea that it has to be brilliant and wonderful or it's shameful. Which, again, goes back to the cultural ideas of, it's not okay to just play. It's not okay to experiment. We have to have an idea and execute it as if it's the greatest thing ever. And how is that even possible when we're stumbling along learning a process, right? I got trapped in perfectionism for quite awhile. I also got trapped in being too serious. So being serious. I'm an empath and a highly sensitive person and introvert, so seriousness comes quite easily to me. Actually, one of the best antidotes came from a mutual friend, Anna Holden, who said, 'Cultivate a sense of amusement.' Being serious is not a good thing when you already tend to be on that side. But there I was stuck, well before I met Anna, being too serious. So I would have these light-hearted happy ideas and then I'd crush them because they weren't serious enough, they weren't... It's not really art if it's not serious! So I crushed those impulses and I just got caught in this spinning circle of contraction and perfectionism and seriousness. The thing that really helped, receiving bodywork really helps. Loosening up the physical restrictions helps with the energetic flow as well. I can't remember how many years ago, I had a summer up in the Yukon. I was still living up there. It's so beautiful up there. It never gets dark. It's just incredible. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a lot of work going on. I was also solo-mothering my daughter but I had time and I had art supplies! I didn't have money for extra art supplies but I had these watercolours. I had a whole bunch of watercolour paper, because my other problem was, I would collect things for the ideas. So I was always collecting stuff to collage with but then not collaging. I was always buying bits and pieces of art supplies but never allowing myself to have the pleasure of making art. I hit this point of deep frustration and fury and irritation with myself and I was like, 'UGH. I'm just gonna sit outside in the sun this afternoon with my paper and my pen and my paint brushes and my watercolours and a jar of water and I don't fucking care what comes out. I'm just gonna sit out there with my stuff and see.' And then, this is the liberating experience was, I started drawing feathers, and colourful circles and balls. I just let it flow. The nasty, critical perfectionist mind, of course, was still hanging out in there. That little eyeball's watching when I'm creating, saying things like, 'What the hell, Janelle? Feathers? Circles? Happy colours?? This isn't you. This is so... This is stupid! Stop it right now!' The part of me that was so tired of that mean, vicious voice shutting me down, it's like, 'I don't care. I don't care. I'm just letting things come out and I'm as surprised as you are that I'm drawing pretty, colourful feathers. But I don't care. I'm just gonna let it go.' I had to let go of my egotistical ideas about my fancy, serious artist creative projects that were gonna wow everyone, and just be okay with making pretty pictures for awhile, you know? Slade: I can so relate. I mean, I've had a lot of conversations this week with me as the patient, you know? Me as the client, talking about this issue with perfectionism and the paralysis that comes along with that. The desperate need that you... It's not like you're not aware that you're doing that to yourself. You KNOW that you are and that's what's so frustrating is that, like, 'Oh! How to make this shut up??' I think it's interesting that you said, really early on in our conversation, we literally make ourselves sick. Because when I was at the chiropractor yesterday with my neck locked up, which is still, it's still sore to turn my head and all that. And that's a common thing that happens to me. That's a place in my body where anxiety tends to go. Some people have stomach stuff. Some people are like neck and shoulders people, or back or head. There's different places in the body that tends to manifest, but mine is always that spot. My first instinct to explain what had happened was to be like, 'Oh, I hurt myself working out.' Because I do work out a lot and I can overdo it or do something with bad form and get a little bit of an issue or something. And that was the first place that I wanted to blame it. It wasn't until I talked to the energy worker, and again when I was talking to the body worker last night who was adjusting me, they were both challenging me that the blocks contracted muscle. The issue was that, like you said, everything was clenched. I was being challenged to accept the fact that this may not be a sports-repetitive-motion injury at all. This is stress induced. This is psychic. And when I say psychic, I mean that in a big term. I mean that in the fact that we can tie ourselves up in knots, whether you believe in psychic abilities at all, you're still capable of mentally, like you said, shrinking yourself. The issue of making yourself small so that you are more acceptable in some way... Janelle: Mmhmm. Slade: It's like all those themes are playing out for me. So I'm sitting here listening to you talk about that and I'm thinking, What a beautiful synchronicity for me to be having this conversation with you right now. I'm really curious. You talked to me about a kind of guided visualization that you do when you first start working with a group of people or some clients before doing a workshop or something like that. Is that something you'd be interested in kind of walking us through right now? Janelle: Yes! Slade: Let's do it! Janelle: I love doing this. I'll give just a little bit of context first... Slade: Okay. Janelle: ...about why I think it's so important to include the body in everything. Slade: Yes. Janelle: Number one is, our body is our ONLY home in this world and we seem to forget that a lot. Number two, back to the cultural stew that we're growing up in, we also inherited these ideas that rational intellectualizing and the thinking functions of ourselves is more important and more valuable than the body-based knowledge and experiences that we also have. So I feel like, bringing the body in is simply reminding people that I work with, and myself, because I can fall off of remembering this easily as well, but the body is JUST as important. If we include our body, the body's psyche, rather than being floating heads and thinking brains, forgetting about the body, we just feel so much better and also intuitively, gut-feelings wise, clairsentience, these are ways of knowing that come through the body first. And if we don't learn how to tune in to the body, we miss out. So for this visualization, first off, are you sitting? Slade: I am. Janelle: Okay so we'll do it from a seated position, because I'm sitting as well. You mentioned that your neck and your upper back often gets uncomfortable. Can you describe just a little more about what's going on? Slade: There's a tension between the shoulder blades and up into the neck. You probably have experienced where you wake up one morning and you can't turn your head all the way to one side or the other without experiencing it being like locked, you know? Having a crick in your neck is how we say it around here. Janelle: Yeah. Slade: Yeah. I asked the body worker last night, I said, 'What's the technical term for that?' She said, 'I think it's nerve impingement.' Yeah, does that help? Janelle: Yeah, it does. So one of the premises of the kind of bodywork that I'm trained in, which is Hellerwork Structural Integration, also known as 'rolfing', is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's never just where the issue is that needs attention. This may or may not help with the crick in your neck, but I know it'll help loosen things up and for everyone that's listening, if you're seated, that's the place to be for playing along with us. Because I'm going to describe this visualization from a seated position. Slade, I'll get you to notice where your sit bones are in relation to the chair. It's easier to tune in if you're sitting on a hard chair, but it's okay if your chair is soft. What you want to do is really have your whole body stacked over your sit bones, so that you're at the highest point. If you're not sure where that is, all you do is let yourself roll back on your pelvis so that you're sinking onto the fleshy part of your bum. You'll notice that your whole body starts to sink and your back rounds forward as you do that. So just take in a nice breath. Actually, if you let your head hang forward, you get to experience a lovely little stretch down your neck and all the way down your spine and through your shoulders. It's kind of a luscious thing to do. What we're doing is a pelvic rock. And then you're going to start rolling forward, tipping your belly forward, and you'll notice, slowly is better, you'll notice as you roll forward you start to get taller. This is how you know where your sit bones are and whether you're on top of them or not. Because when you're on top of them, you're at your high point, the tallest point. Just for contrast, you keep rolling your pelvis forward. You're kind of tightening your lower back and pressing your belly towards your thighs. You'll notice they start to sink a little. Your belly feels like it's spilling out onto your thighs. I'll get you to just tilt that pelvis back until you reach that high point again. And then you're just gonna do another pelvic tilt, rolling back, this time keeping your attention really in your spine. So noticing all the incredible possibilities for movement. Often our spine gets viewed as a one-unit rigid sort of thing but the reason we have so many vertebrae is because we want to have so many options for movement, so many joints to be able to turn and twist and arch and contract. So just notice the incredible ability for your spine to move, and also, really noticing those frozen stuck spots too. And then bringing yourself back on top of your sit bones again. I'll get you to draw your attention down into the soles of your feet. You're just going to press one foot into the ground. Let it go. Press the other foot into the ground. What I want you to notice is how pushing into your foot starts to move your pelvis which starts to move your spine, if you let it. So remember this: a lot of embodiment work and connecting to the body is learning how to let go of all of the layers of tightening and contractions. It's never actually about adding more effort. It's always about noticing sensation and movement, and where you can let go of armouring and tightening and efforting to hold yourself together. Get yourself together. That's a really common thing people say. And that involves a lot of tightness in the body. So as you're just pulsing from foot to foot and noticing the very subtle ways in which your spine is moved by what you're doing in your feet. What I'm going to get you to do now is bring your inner eye right into your tailbone. You're going to notice the tailbone hovering under the sacrum as the bottom of your spine. Draw that inner eye up into the sacrum, which is part of your spine that is fused to your pelvis, right? This is why when you're rocking your pelvis back and forth your spine goes along with it, because it has no choice. If we don't have movement in our pelvis, we don't have a lot of movement in our spine. So hips that are a little more wiggly than our current culture finds acceptable is actually ideal. Draw your attention from your sacrum up through your lumbar vertebrae, which is your lower back. These are big bulky ones. Just, in your mind's eye, picture, even if you don't really know what they look like, just picture these great big bones with these amazing cushions in between them. The joints have a sponge that is designed so that it absorbs pressure and a downward movement compression. And then it has the ability and leads the release of an upward lift. You can move your back as well as you're doing this pressing down, and picturing every single little disc between your vertebrae all the way up your spine, squishing down on them. Lift, an upward movement and so much spaciousness, right? Now I'll get you to bring your attention up your spine to where your ribs join your spine. The really beautiful thing to imagine is that your rib cage is not a big block. It's more like a bellows, an accordion. If you slowly twist from side to side through your shoulders, what you'll notice is, your rib cage basically goes along for the ride. And as you're twisting, allow your head to keep reaching back so you get a little bit of a stretch. You might also notice where you're a little limited in motion. As you're just doing a gentle rotation, a twist from side to side through your rib cage, keep your attention in your spine. Imagine that the twist is only happening from your spine. And then the ribs, as they're attaching to your spine, they kind of fan out. They have a capacity for way more movement than we allow. They fan out as we twist away to the side and then they come back in. There's also muscles between every rib that has the capacity to expand and contract. So if you take a really big breath in, and really breathe and notice what's happening in your ribs, but also send that breath into your spine where your ribs attach. And just notice. It's all about noticing, and then exhaling. Just do your breathing at your own pace. And then just doing a little rotation in your spine between your ribs. Noticing the movement in your ribs from your spine. Drawing your attention up to your neck and to your head, floating on top of your neck. We often separate the neck from the rest of the spine by naming it the neck, and having the idea of a stopping point at the top of the shoulders and a stopping point at the base of the skull. For this exercise, I'll just get you to imagine there are no stopping points. So when the neck is moving, it is in response to the movement in your mid-back and your mid-spine. See if you can draw in this elegant idea of capacity for movement as well as compression and release in the cushions between the vertebrae. Invite a little more freedom in. So most of this is slow, steady and gentle. And it's all about bringing your attention inside your body. Do one little last scan of your spine. Just noticing, and then opening your eyes if they're closed. If they're open, just kind of sharpening the focus. Letting your eyes land on some sort of tangible object in the room, and just noticing three details about it. And then letting your eyes land somewhere else, noticing another three details, specific details. And then bringing that attention that you're sending out through your eyes back to your ears, into this conversation and the more mundane regular world way of connecting. Slade: Lovely! That was wonderful. Thank you! relaxing sigh Now I have to remember I'm in the middle of an interview, right?? That's so cool. Too bad it's not on video. It would be quite an interesting thing for people to have witnessed. That is very cool. I'll put something in the introduction to prompt people who might be driving that that's coming up and that way, if they want to wait and do it. OR if you're driving and you just listen to that, and you're like, Oh that was really cool, go back later when you're home and do that as a guided visualization. There is a guided visualization in the middle of this episode! That's so cool! So how does that help with the creativity? Janelle: It just does. That's my fastest answer. More specifically, if you think of creativity as being a state of flow, unblocking flow in the body unblocks flow creatively. The other really cool thing is that, especially if your creative energy and output has been generated more through thinking and through head-based processes, it's like we just opened a few doors and windows to give you a better view, give you better access to your creative energy so you're getting more of it. Slade: Ooo I just saw this cool image in my mind's eye of like, when you have a door window open at one end of a space, and you go and open a door window in the other, you create this draft. You create literal flow. Like, it will slam the doors closed. Janelle: Yes! That's perfect. Slade: Very cool. You talked about somewhere in some of the material I was reading of yours, you have this phrase, 'letting the body lead you towards your stories'. What does that mean? How do we do that? Janelle: Okay. You can actually, what I just walked you through, that visualization, this is fun. You do something physical. You have a pen and paper and a timer. Right after that, you're in a bit of a different state, right? You do some flow writing. And if you keep your brainy brain part of things out of it, the part that wants to figure it out and is dreaming of writing awards already, if you keep that out, you do some sort of physical exercise and then you go straight into flow writing. It's like unwrapping a present, because something will show up. And if you stay open to not-knowing, it's really thrilling what will bubble up and come out. Actually, you mentioned you work out a lot. You can actually play with doing that after a workout. Or if, I don't know how you work out, but if, say, one day it's a legs day or something, you can very explicitly have the intention that you're gonna really tax your legs, you're gonna focus on that part of your body, and then you're gonna let your body write through you. You're gonna let those legs tell you something about them, or let them release a memory or story. It's pretty fun. The delight is just in the utter magic of what happens when we let ourselves be led and guided by our body, instead of trying to force it. Slade: Those of you listening who do my energy reboot are probably noticing the similarities. One of the things that I recommend to people to do to reconnect to their creativity, it's not so much about being blocked. Because obviously I can't be giving advice about that just yet. But as far as reconnecting to the creativity, or reconnecting to your sense of your Higher Self speaking to you, I recommend a combination of walking meditation with timed proprioceptive writing. Janelle: Yeah! Slade: Those two things in tandem, and I say, don't overthink it, just do it. It may not happen the first time, but what will emerge is through that grounding exercise, being in the body, you actually reconnect your antenna, so to speak. And then the writing allows you to start to translate that, to give a voice to record it and let it through. One thing attaches the hose and the other thing sort of turns the knob and lets it flow out. Does that make sense? Janelle: Oh yeah, total sense. I'll add a clarification to writing and staying in the body, rather than kind of tapping into a more unseen sort of energy or force that's more outside of the body. I totally agree with you. The body grounds us and you can be a more clear channel for that kind of guidance. And if you want to really specifically stay with the body, in your writing, and really tune into the body's psyche's stories, guidance, etc., it helps to just focus your attention in sensation and then be really specific with details when you're writing sensory details. So whatever's coming up, always asking the question, so allowing the flow to come out, but having a, in the back of your mind, just this reminder of, Oh, it was a beautiful day, so what are the specifics? What tells me it's a beautiful day? And what will tell the people reading this, if they ever do, it's a beautiful day? Or, Oh, my leg was sore. Okay. Let's get waaaay more specific. What part of the leg? What does sore mean? What's the sensation? Finding words to describe the physical experience. That will help to contain that kind of flow writing within the body. Slade: Well it's interesting too because for story telling, I mean, if you were editing a piece of fiction, one of the things you would look to make sure that you're doing is giving your reader multiple sensory information, so you know, to ground them in the story, to make sure that you're introducing smells and touch. And that everything isn't just always somebody looking at someone else, or thinking. You have to be really conscious to put that in. And I know everybody thinks that this magically happens, but sometimes you do have to consciously remind yourself to insert that. We have a tendency to focus on one clair sometimes, more than the other. We're either very visual or very feeling, sensory. And sometimes you have to balance those out with whichever one you don't see showing up. Does that make sense? Janelle: Yeah. It just makes it richer. Slade: Yeah. It's gonna be better for both you, as the person creating it, and if it finds its way to an audience, then they're going to be able to inhabit your experience that much more easily as well. Oh gosh, I love talking nerdtalk about writing. Janelle: It's fun. Slade: You're hitting all the buttons because you've got the psychic and the bodywork and the intuition, all the stuff, so we're loving this. Tell me about this transformational memoir writing process that you do, called The Art of Personal Mythmaking. I know you have a workshop that's kind of specific to a time of year and everything, so tell us about that and when you're doing it. Janelle: Okay. This is kind of a fun story too. So for a long time, doing all these different things, I thought, What the heck? This doesn't make sense. When are the threads gonna cross? And then about three or four years ago, this process showed up to me. I can't really claim credit for the personal mythmaking process. It just showed up to me as it's own entity. I offered it in person as a workshop for eight weeks. It was not about memoir writing at that time. I didn't think it was anyways. There was a really great response and I thought, I could teach this online! So then I kind of revamped it. I offered it again. I still didn't know it was about memoir writing. Everything was about writing your life story, healing through examining life's story, tapping into the body and using creative writing and I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology, so I love being an anthropology nerd and bringing in culture and all of that stuff. I was still confused. And then, I think just over a year ago, I realized that if someone really committed themselves to the full process, they have the rough draft of their memoir written based on how I was taking them through the process and the creative writing prompts. So I went, AHA! This is amazing! People asked me what I was doing, I said, I'm teaching this process and you actually get the rough draft of your memoir written by the end. And everyone's eyes would start to shine. And they go, Oooo! And I thought, Oh wow, that's what this is about! It's healing but it's also actually a very practical outcome as well of getting to the point of getting it out of yourself, onto paper, to rough draft stage. So all the process work, which, you know, it is amazing how many people have been dreaming about working with their life story and writing their memoirs for decades. Slade: Yes. Janelle: And either haven't started or they just have a bunch of overwhelming snippets of writing here, there and everywhere that they've tucked away in a metaphorical drawer or file on their computer and it's just eating at them. So I thought, this is not good. This is creative blocks where you start to get sick. If there's a story dying to be born, and we close the doors and shut it down out of overwhelm and fear, two common reasons people don't dive in, even though they have the desire, that's not good! We're making ourselves sick if we have stories to tell and we're not telling them. So The Art of Personal Mythmaking is a transformational memoir writing e-course and writing circle. I teach it online. Each week has its theme. I use fairytales, well more specifically, ancient tales. So any kind of tale that has lasted more than a generation basically, as a guide and a structure for outlining memoir, but also... I don't know. I feel like fairytales are like having a pretty wise grandma or grandpa, helping us out, to understand being human. And they can actually really help us with working through our life story. So I combine working with ancient tales with working with the body and creative writing and creativity. A lot of people, you know, they're just stuck in creative block or a fear of not being good enough. A desire to write but being so afraid of being a bad writer that they don't try. So getting past those things is really crucial to actually getting the writing out. And then coming together in a discussion and circle every week is so rich and so beautiful for people to be working through these themes in a supportive environment and be witness to the incredible richness of every single person's different way of understanding and writing about the same prompt is so beautiful. I don't know if I've described it very well. I get so excited about my students. Slade: You do it twice a year? Janelle: Yeah. Slade: And when's the next one? Janelle: August and February. So right now, we're looking at February coming up. Slade: Okay. So February 2019. We're recording this in September 2018 if anybody is listening from the future. They can go find out if you're still doing this workshop. And you may be doing it still in August and February. Or it may have evolved into something else! I suppose if we're on your mailing list, you'll remind us that this is coming up and one of the gifts that you have for people who subscribe is a two hour Outline Your Memoir workshop that you offer. Janelle: Yes. Slade: Okay. Tell us a little about that. Janelle: Actually it's a little different... It is free. It's a little different than a gift that just shows in your inbox. It's actually a live two-hour workshop. The way I work with people is really connected and relational and productive. Don't know if that's the wrong word but ... So I actually walk people through the process. So although it's a free workshop, it's not a workshop that I record. I have a couple free writing courses that do just show up in your inbox, but Outline Your Memoir is actually, you show up with your pen and paper and I offer it every two months or so. I walk you through the process of getting some structure to what you want to look at and work on and finish the two hours feeling really resourced to keep going. Slade: That is really cool! First of all, let me just say, Janelle, thank you for taking time today to speak with us and walk us through that process. Make sure everyone knows where they can go to find you online. Janelle: Right. I'm JanelleHardy.com You can probably also google 'Personal Mythmaking'. I don't think anyone else is really describing their work that way, so Janelle and Personal Mythmaking will get you there too. Slade: Wonderful. That was great. Janelle, thank you for coming on the show. Janelle: Thank you! Such a pleasure.

Hi. Yodelo. Um ... Hello world. How are you? Are you fabulous? How are you? Are you fabulous, and have you been having too much fun? Because I feel like a beautiful Saturday on the Gold Coast is a good day to have too much fun. Why do I look blurry? Why? I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna finish eating my bowl of steak with salt on it, because my appetite is insane lately. I don't understand what's happening. I've got my chocolate green smoothie, chocolate flavoured green smoothie, which is my own supplement brand product by the way, which I still have not fucking launched, but I do have it and it tastes amazing. I've got that. I've got my black triple shot ... coffee. And I've got my bowl of steak with Himalayan salt on it, so I'm pretty set. Hopefully ... Hopefully ... Hopefully, I'm not gonna end up with steak in my teeth. But it's a risk I'm willing to take. How are you? What's happening in your world Sarah [Bendell 00:01:48]? Daria? Whoever else is there? 22 fabulous people. Kiana, Christina, if you're there, say hello. And if you're not there, I suppose you wouldn't be able to say hello. Maybe you could be energetically sending a message if you're not there. So, I did my blog. My blog was badass as fuck today. If you haven't read it, I don't know what you're even thinking. You should go read it. Not now, after this. So good. And it went extra long. Okay, I feel like this camera's super blurry. Am I making that up? I did my blog. I was sitting in my kitchen, which is right there, eating my steak, doing my blog, and then answering everyone's inquiries about Rich Hot Empire, and then I wanted but I was still eating, and then I was like, "Well, what the hell has that got to do with it?" Is it illegal to eat steak on a live stream? Potentially I could lose a few people who don't care for that sort of behaviour, but I suppose I'd be okay with it. Okay. I'm having the best day ever. Thank you, Daria. My secret is that I'm lazy. Daria says, "I love tuning in to you. You're so blunt and fabulous." You know that I have to say the word fabulous like that. I said, "Fabulous." Because it's how I feel about it. It's fabulous. So, me being so blunt, and fabulous. Thank you. I'm pretty certain it's because I'm really freaking lazy. Oh, hi Dee. Hello there Rich Hot Empire badass. Although I haven't even replied, I haven't checked your latest reply. I could check it right now. It's two to confirm. Yes. I'm confirming what you just wrote. It's done. Okay. I'll write back to you afterwards. I'll get your link and stuff. So, anyhow, I was conducting my personal business right ... well, my business, business. Which is my personal business. It's all intermingled. Me being so blunt, and people like that, and they think it's funny, but I'm pretty certain it's just because I'm very lazy at my core, and what I mean by that is, when I ... Okay. Why do I have fluffy bits? I tried to do this side just perfectly so that I would look, you know, just kind of casually beautiful on the live stream. That was the look that I was going for. I was going for casually beautiful and feminine and sweet. Did I nail it? If I kind of play with my hair a little bit and look a little bit girly, I can definitely nail feminine and sweet. Even though this morning I was grunting like a beast in the gym, doing leg presses, super set, with walking lunges. Man, I smashed the fuck out of my legs. And then I did, at the end, I finished with three sets of 20 reps of leg extensions at kind of my maximum weight. For that many reps, for sure. It's just probably the most vile and disgusting beautiful thing in the world, getting those final five or six reps when you're doing high reps of leg extensions. It's excruciating. But now I've flipped from gym badass into feminine sweet person with Superdry tee shirt on. Drinking black coffee and eating steak. So, I got really bored at ... Well, I was bored with myself, and I was exhausted. Exhausted, from trying so hard to not be me. This is back in ... I can remember ... This steak is so good, you guys. I don't know how I don't just snack on steak all through the day. Well, largely I do is the truth of the matter. Been so hungry this past week. I swear to God I'm eating probably 10 000 calories a day at the moment, if I would be counting them. I have no idea what's happening. It's insane. If I didn't know better, and I do, then I would think that I'm pregnant. I'm 100% not. I don't know, but I've been training like a machine. I'm getting stronger and stronger, and I'm already fricking strong, and my legs are getting just so rock solid defined. So, I'm just eating all the carbs and all the protein. I'm welcoming all of it. Anyhow, in 2014 I think it was, I did an event at spiky building down yonder. I'll show you. Do you see that spiky building there? Can you see the spike? I'll go show you properly. Let me turn it around. See that spiky building? It's called Q1. There's the beach. There it is. All right, here I am again. It's the world's tallest residential building, apparently. I used to live in it. In 2014, I was living in that building for the first six months of the year. I ran an event there, a one day business event. Actually, Dee's here. She was at my one day San Diego event a few weeks ago, the Soul Shifts and Money Making Day, which was so fun, and so amazing, and so flow based. It was Soul Shifts and Money Making. But the week before that, I did the same event in New York, and I ran into one of my clients the night before the New York event in the lift. Christie [Berley 00:07:06], actually. And she said, regarding the event, do those sort of things exhaust me and tyre me out. And am I gonna be tired out after the one day event the next day. Thank you, Dee. It was so amazing. The energy of everybody in the room just made it so incredible, because I only attract soul mate clients in, so it certainly makes my job enjoyable [inaudible 00:07:26]. I think I need to turn the air conditioning on. I'm overheating already. Or it's the steak. So, Christie said am I gonna be tired after the event. And it is gonna drain my energy, and I was like, "Fuck no." It does the opposite, yeah. Your coach. It does the opposite of that. It elevates me, I said to her. I said to her, I'll be levitating through the ceiling of the Union Square W Hotel, which is where we were at, and that's indeed what happened. I get so much energy from seeing my clients in person. Even brand new clients that I've never met or hung out with like an event. Oh, hey Mandy, who was at the San Diego event also. So, I get so much energy, I get high vibe as fuck. I get kind of silly and crazy because I get really elevated. If you've ever seen me go super silly and crazy on a live stream, which I'm pretty sure happened just one time maybe in like 2017, or something. I've still got this same piece of steak in the side of my mouth. But I'm just gonna go ahead and add another one. I'm like screw it, just keeping bits of steak in the side of the mouth. Or chewing it up until it becomes, into like a mushy thing that you would then feed straight out of your mouth into your babies mouth. And if you've never had a baby and fed them straight out of your own mouth into their mouth, you think that's probably gross, but it's actually ideal. There's even properties in the saliva of the mother that are good for the baby. So, I'm just giving you so many tips here. I'm giving you freaking parenting tips, nutrition tips for babies, I'm all over it. My daughter's first food was when she was four months old, and she grabbed a T-bone steak out of her dad's hand at the dinner table, and just started chowing down on it. Like, um-num-num. Kids love steak. All right. So, yes. Sometimes I get high vibe and distracted, and a little bit silly, and I lose track of what I'm doing. It happens just on the very odd occasion. But anyway, after the Soul Shifts and Money Making days, I was so freaking elevated that I even needed 29 orgasms instantly, or probably like a three hour massage in order to bring myself down to life. And some wine, and some more fun times with clients. And so, actually what I did was I ended up going to bed with one of my clients. The fabulous Amanda Francis. Nobody had any orgasms. Don't freak out. But we did do a two hour live stream together. That helped. In fact, it made us even sillier than we already were. And eventually we came back down to earth, probably several weeks later. And my point is, in 2014, I did a one day event in that building that I just showed you, the Q1 building, and I just remember being exhausted. Hello Debbie, hello Theo, hello Addison, hello everybody jumping on. No, the orgasms are for the point of release, because I go so freaking high vibe from doing my own work, that I'm like, my head is going to explode, you guys. It's a serious genuine problem. Driven women need a lot of sex. This is an important conversation that we could get into or not get into. But like somebody said to me recently about it. Like I'm a man and need a lot of sex. And I'm like, "Excuse me, that's actually not a man thing." It might be a man thing, for sure. I'm not saying it's not a man thing. That's a driven woman thing. So, don't be like, "I'm a man and I need more sex than you." That's not how it works. Driven women need more sex than anybody. It's like in fucking Wikipedia. You can look it up. No need to look it up. You all agree anyway. We all know this. So, where was I? So, I did exhaustive horrible event down there. It was so exhausting. So exhausting. I was high with a hot flash and the sweats, and blurry dizzy vision, from trying so fucking hard to be a professional business fucking coach. I even wore a tight ... trying to remember the names of these different skirt things. Driven people, says Pete. I'll agree with that. I'll take that. Well, it's people who are alive with life. Let's face it, sex is the creation of life. That's what it is. So, if you're lit up with life, then you're gonna require and desire a lot of sex, and also for the purposes of after you've done an amazing live stream or event, then somebody's gotta fricking deal with all that energy that's going on. Who's going to deal with it? If nobody comes along and deals with it, then I have to freaking walk around with that shit. I can deal with it myself, and often do, obviously. But otherwise, I seriously get so high that I'm like, I cannot ... I can't ... I'm just spinning. I'm spin, spin, spinning into the sky. I need all the things all at once to just try and keep me somewhat attached to earth. I don't always wanna be attached to earth. And sometimes the sex makes you go even more off the earth. Anyway, it's a very fascinating conversation. I'm sure you'll agree. I'm writing two books about sex at the moment. One is called Three ... This is not a joke. This is the title of my book. It's nearly done. Three Orgasms Before Breakfast, semicolon, The Truth About Driven Women and Sex. The other one I don't even remember what it's called. But both of them are gonna be amazing. So, I was wearing a pin skirt. What's it called? A tight skirt that's a pin frame, where it's kind of like ... it goes down like a pin. I don't know what it's called. What kind of skirt is that called? And it had stripes on it, because I felt like it made me look super professional, and then a tight fitted blouse. That was my professional Barbie look. Business coach Barbie. And I just wanted to impress people. I wanted to ... Pencil skirt. That's the one. I knew it wasn't pin. Thank you, Debbie. I just wanted to impress people. I wanted people to think I was a good business coach, I wanted them to take me seriously. I didn't believe in myself, or I hadn't given myself permission to be who I am. Everybody knows this except me. Pencil skirt. Why did I say pin skirt? I don't know, I'm just making shit up. I should design pin skirts and sell them. Yeah. I guess, I just didn't give myself permission to be me. I didn't think that I could just be myself, and be a business coach, or a coach of any kind and make money doing that. It was all about showing people that you're so fricking cool, that you've got your shit together, or something like that. So, I'm sure people had a decent enough time at the the event, but I was not one of the people who had a decent time at that event, or any event in that sort of pre ... That era. It was roughly early 2014, that exact time when I went fuck this shit, and started going all in on my own message, and doing exactly what I wanted, and saying exactly what I wanted. So, that would've been probably the last thing that I did like that, where it was just so fucking exhausting, and all of this is just because Daria, I think it was, said, "Kat, you're so blunt and fabulous." And I'm like, "Let me explain why I'm so blunt." Because I got so fucking shit of that, sick of that, I got so sick of trying to not be me and trying to present myself to the world as a successful person, and it was so tiring and exhausting, and it would just wear me out. And so, why I'm so blunt now, and I just hang out here, being myself and saying whatever I want, the same way as how I talk with you, with me in person, nothing will change, right? People say it to me all the time. They'll say, "You're exactly the same in person as you are online." I look exactly the same, I don't look like a completely different version of myself in my photos and shit online. That does my head in when people do that, and then you don't even recognise them in person. That really kind ... I'm like, "Why? Why?" And I talk the same, and I ramble on the same, and I'm the same, right? And I think it was because at my core, maybe I'm really fucking lazy. And maybe my whole business is because I'm fucking lazy, because in the end, I just wanted to be myself and take it or leave it, and I guess some of you took it, and so here you are. Thank you. Now I'm free, says Candice. And unapologetically me. That's good coffee. Good. I didn't wear a pencil skirt recently. I feel like I could do it for a skit though, Melissa. If I did a skit about being a Stepford-preneur. I don't have any anymore, but I'm sure I could get some from somewhere. No need to qualify for anyone's approval, says Tolepa. When we let the goal do the fucking work. So true, but I didn't really know that then. And now I know. And now I teach it. Today we're talking about faith though. I don't know why you guys are getting me so distracted with all these other conversations. It's exhausting to try to not be who you are. That's right, Theo. It's exhausting and counterproductive, and then do you know what the worst part of it is? The worst part? It'd be like ... I've never done this, but imagine ... I can imagine what it would be like, if you made up a fake version of yourself on a dating profile, and you used old photos that were not current. Obviously I just said the same thing twice. Or if you pretend to be interested in stuff that the person you are interested in is interested in, that sort of shit. And then you think that maybe you got the outcome that you wanted, like you tricked somebody into being with you or something. Do you know what the huge problem with that is? You then gotta keep fucking being the person that you're not. How you gonna do that? Wine. Obviously. I prefer to have the wine and be myself. So, what do we call this live stream? Faith, something about faith. Okay, the reason I wrote this is because one person, who's an amazing badass person, who literally just took the second to last place in this round of Rich Hot Empire, right before I did this live stream. We were messaging, and she was talking about fear, and wanting to step up obviously, and be that version of herself who she knows she's here to be, but I guess the fear and uncertainty of investing and working with me, and investing in herself energetically in that way, and all the feelings that come up with that, and I talk a lot to people about fear versus faith. And she said something about how she'd been in faith late last night, and ready to say, "Hell yes", and then fear had come up again. I am Batman, Christine. Somebody has to be. Nathan, my son, swears that I'm not Batman, but what does he know? I am Batman. He think she is. So, yeah. So then I said to her ... I just copied this title of this live stream straight out of the message thread where I was talking to her. I said, "It is a practise and a discipline to release fear and act from faith." And then I thought this is a good topic to talk about. But then, meanwhile, by the time I'm finished setting up the live stream and getting ready and coming over here, she had already said, "Fuck yes", and she signed up. And that was the second last place, just hint, hint, hint. All right? Message me if you still want in. I can't even promote it anymore, because it's gonna sell out instantly. Probably sold out already right now while I'm on this live stream. Okay. There's like a little bit of fat there that I don't wanna eat. I'm fine with eating fat, but sometimes I don't like the taste of it. Okay, I'm done. Now I'm gonna eat chocolate after this. A perfect diet is chocolate flavoured green smoothies, super strong black coffee, triple shot espresso, multiple times per day. As many times as is required, plenty of steak with salt on it, and some Seashell Guylian chocolates. That's all your food groups in one hit, you guys. That's a perfect diet. You heard it from me here. In fact, another book that I'm writing, and this is not kidding either, is called The Red Wine Coffee Steak and Chocolate Diet for Women, or something like that. No, not steak. Red wine, the wine, coffee, protein, and chocolate diet for women. That's a real diet. I've been living on it for 20 years. It's working fine. It's working fabulously. Okay. Is it kinda grossing you out that I'm eating on the live stream? Yesterday, one of my clients was eating a bag of chips, very noisily, while she Voxxed me her audios, and so I figure of someone can crunch chips while they're talking to me, I can freaking eat while I'm on a live stream too. Okay. It is a practise and a discipline to act from ... to release fear, and act from faith. What do I mean by that? What do I mean, what do I mean, Anna [Shelly 00:19:37], respond. I'll just bring somebody to the mic. I'd love to just bring somebody on to the the live stream right now. Huh. What's happening here? Oh. Callie just sent me ... My assistant Callie, just sent me, "Hi Katrina, we ..." From Facebook. "We reviewed the profile you reported since it violated our standards, we removed it. Thank you. From Facebook." Thank you Facebook. So, somebody was trying to be me yesterday, and a bunch of you guys helped out and reported that. Thank you. Okay. I'm ready to talk. Now, 100% of the way that I live my life, is acting from faith. Sometimes I say acting from faith, sometimes I say acting from soul desires. I kinda mean the same thing. Because I believe that what my soul desires, and also requires, which is a critical word that we should dive into momentarily, what my soul desires and also requires is gonna be based on faith also. Those two things will not be in conflict. Somebody said to me this week, something about feeling like her soul desires, what felt aligned, did not feel the same as what's in integrity. And I was like, that's not a thing. What is in alignment for you is in integrity for you. You might feel that it's not integrity because maybe it's breaking some rules. The workout live stream? What workout live stream? Anna says yes. Lizzie, I finished eating. I could get the chocolates and start on the chocolates now. I don't usually eat chocolate in the middle of the day though. Of course you can eat on your live stream. Eat whatever you want. You need to get practise tattooed too. Oh, when I get a tattoo ... [inaudible 00:21:24] She just randomly drops into the conversation. What's happening? Send me a photo of it straight away. As soon as it's done, or while it's being done. Add the word practise on, right now. Why not? So, it's all about living in accordance with your values. The whole fricking thing is about being in accordance with your own values. Back in the day, let me think which day it was. It would've been roughly in 2013, I believe, or 12 even. Yeah, 13, I was pregnant with Nathan. I would always drive up to whichever gym I was going to at the time, back where I lived in Melbourne, and I would sit there early, at like 6AM. I would leave Alyssa with her dad back when we were still together then, and I would go early to the earliest café that opened nearby. I think it opened even at five, I'd go super early. And I'd sit and do my morning study and reading, and then my journaling, and then I'd go workout. Same as roughly now. Same as I was doing for many years before that also. But I'm thinking of this one particular café where I used to go all the time, because I can specifically remember being in the corner of this particular coffee shop, and writing a lot to do with my values, for like a good year, I think. I mean, I'd just dive into all these topics repeatedly. But I think that I've had things through different aspects of my journaling and inner work, and I remember that my theme for a long while then, and back when I was going to this coffee shop was around my values, and really just getting clear on what do I believe? What's important to me? What are my values and priorities? Which are essentially like the rules that you wanna live your life by, right? So, one of my values is obviously health and fitness. That's important to me. I will prioritise it. Family is a value, inner work and mindset work is a value. Spirituality, connectedness to God. Fucking steak is definitely a value. It's a value that's empty now. Shenanigans. Can you actually say shenanigans on one of your values? Can I put that on my list of values and laminate it? Definitely shenanigans. Fun is one of my values. Being myself, and so on and so forth. So, anyway. Living in alignment is simply living in accordance with your values. And the whole idea of the whole damn thing is that when you know what matters to you, and you know what your values are, and what's important to you, and then you live in accordance with that, you live in alignment with that, that you create the life that you're meant to have, and that you can't fuck it up, and that everything is just created and done and available for you, right? So, it's your blueprint. I like to do a mic drop at the end of when I do a live presentation. I bring the fire and the brimstone, and I kick people's ass about being themselves in business and live, and how I like to finish my keynote ... I don't have a script or anything, but I have ... I guess it's inside of me to a degree. I like to finish with being ... Start with something like, stop looking for the goddamn blueprint that's gonna make you millions of dollars, and impact millions of people, and allow you to live the life you fricking want. You were born with the damn blueprint. The blueprint is inside of you, but you gotta go looking for that shit, right? You gotta take time to find it. Not just one time, either. Not just for 2013. For every day. Practise. It's done. Coffee's done. Steak is done. Chocolate green smoothie is not done. Live stream is definitely not done. So, here's the thing, right? This is important. That's why I add the sceptre. Just to emphasise my point. You gotta be tuning in on this shit daily. In some way, shape, or form. Okay? Wait, there's a piece of steak up here. I'd forget it's up there and it would just sit there until that mid afternoon, I'll probably find it while I'm having a massage, and then have a little steak snack. It's done now. I sorted it out. Look how fabulous my teeth are. They're super white. Just by all the steak eating. Stop looking, you already have. I feel like there's a word missing there, but I like the undertone of it, Candice. Okay. You've gotta go turning in. Not really looking. Maybe you've gotta go looking at first if you've not done any looking, and you don't even fricking know what your values are, but that's a bullshit lie. Of course you know what your values are. Of course you know. You do know. You may not be paying attention. You may be pretending all manner of bullshit. And just making things up, and living the wrong fricking life. But at your core, you already know. However, for me, the inner work has been a daily thing that I've done for many, many years, and it's just a daily way that I connect to my soul, to my core. I remind myself of things that I already know. I often write down a load of stuff in my journaling. It's like, that I've repetitively in some way written or acknowledged, or kind of connected to for years, and years, and years. And I reinforce my beliefs, I reinforce affirmations and things that I'm wanting to create. Sometimes I've sort shit out, or kind of detoxed, or brained up a bunch of stuff. But a lot of it is really just reinforcing and reconnecting to my belief system, my values, and naming and claiming what it is that I'm here to create in the world. Also connecting to my soul. Exactly what I'm saying now Christine, is how you find that blueprint every day. So, I'm kind of getting ... I'm leading into the how of the, yeah. The how of that. So, it's kind of like taking the time to connect in what am I feeling, what feels important to me, and to remind myself of that. What is it that I believe that I can create into my life? Yes, I write it down and so done. I am. You guys saw that I put you are, on Facebook this morning? It was interesting to watch people's responses to that little Facebook post. I don't care what people respond to it, because obviously they can perceive it however they wanna perceive it, and it's fine. And some of the responses were quite funny. But actually, the reason that I wrote that is that I was doing my inner work at the time, and my study. I always do like a morning kind of spiritual soul shift type study, which just means reading something for a few minutes that speaks to my soul. And then I go into my journaling, and I was reading and setting intentions around focusing on who the words I am, are the most powerful words that we have available to us, right? I believe. Because I am is a finite statement in itself. You are complete, you are whole. I am, period, the end. And that's everything. Everything is already done in those two words. But also in journaling, and inner work, when you use the words I am, that's incredibly fucking powerful and you create it to life. That's why I wrote you are. And not that I expect everyone to read my mind and know the reasons that I wrote that, but a few people seemed to pick up on it, which is cool. So, coming back, coming back, coming back, the whole alignment thing. What is your soul desire? Acting from faith, it's a practise and a fricking discipline to release fear and to act from faith. Well, the process that I just explained, like some form of daily inner work and checking in and tuning in, whether it's journaling, whether it's through your own messaging. This is me doing inner work right now, right? I'm reinforcing a bunch of stuff for myself. Also, every time I write, or talk to my clients. And I'm sure for you, maybe when you talk to certain friends, or mentors, or you hang out in my communities and groups, then you reinforce that stuff and you look at it and you connect back to your core. You remind yourself of what matters, and of what you value, and of what you choose to believe because beliefs are a choice. And then, and then, and then, and this is how I do life, this is how I play life and decide what action to take and where my energy and time should go, is I connect to well what would faith have me do? With all of these things being in place, my values, my beliefs, the way that I choose to see the world, and knowing that of course I can create anything I desire and anything that comes to me, if I truly did believe all that, then what actions would I be taking today in my business and in my life, and in all areas? How would I be showing up, right? So, I take the time to connect to these things, even just for a few moments a day and it's kind of a running mantra through my mind all the time anyway, just because of how long I've been doing this shit for, and it's how I think all the time. But certainly, if there was anything where I was experiencing fear, or I was coming from a scarcity mindset and I would feel and notice that for sure, then I would really very deliberately practise coming from faith, not fear. And what most people are doing, and what you might be doing, is reactively living their lives based on fear. Not a good idea, all right? What that means is, if you've got underlying belief systems running through you relevant to money, relevant to business, relevant to getting soul mate clients, maybe relevant to your health and being in shape, maybe relevant to attracting an amazing partner and finding the people that you wanna connect with in your life in that way, then that is gonna create you the wrong outcomes for you. Not an aligned outcome, because you're literally creating your life based on a fear and scarcity mindset. A lot of times, I mean, down there, people out there, places that are not here, people don't even know this, right? They're not even conscious enough to realise that they're reacting from faith. The Four Agreements, I've heard of, but no, I've never read that. And thank you for bringing that book to my attention, Kyle. I've definitely heard it mentioned, and I think I said that I would read it, or I noted in my mind that I'd like to read it, but then forgot. I read so much different stuff all the time though. So, yeah. Mostly people are not even conscious of it, right? They don't know they have a fucking fear mindset or a scarcity mindset. They believe that's how the world is. That's how life works. This is how it is. Well, I'm not really here to preach to those people. Occasionally I'll meet one of them in my travels, one of the real people in the normal world, and then something I say, or something they say will make me aware that they're actually like us, and then I would open up the conversation more. But I'm not here to try and convince people to even start thinking. I'm here for the people who are already conscious around this stuff, who already have awareness around it, who already have these underlying beliefs around abundance, and getting to have it all, and have it on our terms. But maybe you've not full stepped into owning it yet, right? Your consciousness is returning. Exactly, Mandy. So, for those people, and this could be you, you'd be aware when you've got a fear mindset going on, or a scarcity or a lack mindset. Sometimes you might pretend that you don't know, or you just allow that fear to rule you, or you go into some kind of razzled, panic type situation. Like oh my God, the sky is ending, the sky is falling, the world is ending, everything's not working, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The world hates me, and so on and so forth. But you do know, right? And so, it's a practise. That's what I mean by the title of this live feed. It is a practise to release fear and act from faith. Now, for me, my business, in business and money, I practise that shit so fucking much for years, because I really just decided to apply myself and to shift it. The truth is I don't have to consciously practise it at all anymore. However, it is still a daily practise. It's just not something that I think about doing it. It happens automatically for me. I always act from faith, which is to say what does my soul direct me to do? What am I guided to do from within? And I act from a place of believing that I'm safe, and I believing that I can have it all, that's how I choose to directions that I take in every different element of my business. Whether it be what I'm selling, what I'm saying, how I'm responding to somebody who's inquiring about working with me, how I do my marketing, how I do PR, everything. The question is always what is my soul telling me to do? Simple. And usually I don't even need to ask the question. The answers just come up automatically, right? In other earning, fitness, in fitness and food, same thing. Exactly the same thing. It's 100% intuitive for me. I used to do all the stupid diets, I used to live in so much fear to do with my body, and I can't eat this, and then I'm gonna gain weight, and now I gotta do extra cardio, and it was just very tiresome. Probably for everybody that had to put up with me as well as myself. It was not fun. I didn't enjoy it. Even last year, I slipped back into a fear routine with food and training, and I got heavier. How much, maybe six or seven pounds heavier than I am now. So, not a crazy amount, but I felt like a lot bigger than I like to be, and I can remember being in so much fear where I was like man, I really want toast this morning with my breakfast, but I really shouldn't. I'm gonna gain weight, and I shouldn't eat this, and I shouldn't eat that, and then I just snapped myself out of it in December last year. I was like what the fuck? I'm gonna eat what I fricking want, and believe that I make good choices for myself. That's faith, right? I'm gonna give myself freedom. I'm also gonna fucking remind myself that results come from mindset. I don't care what anybody says, right? And I have a really fucking extensive background in nutrition, in advanced nutrition, in hormonal sciences and studies. I know all the fricking science of what you should be eating, but your mindset is way more powerful. If you believe that you can be lean eating fricking pizza and donuts, you will be. I'm not saying to eat it. I'm saying your belief's fucking matter. Right? Like now, for breakfast this morning for example, I had a massive serve of french toast, with syrup on it, berries, bananas, bacon, scrambled eggs, then went to the gym, smashed out my legs, now I ate a bowl of steak just then. You saw that. Whatever. I eat what I want. I don't base it on anything except what do I desire, and I choose to trust. And so, it's intuition and flow, and it's freedom. Freedom. Like great, I get to have the body I want. I love that. I love feeling hard and looking how I desire to look, but what's more interesting to me and powerful is freedom, and that's what I'm here to share, in all areas. Now, where I personally ... So, with the money stuff and the business stuff, I don't really gotta practise around my food and nutrition. Even when I go to the gym, I'm like what is my soul telling me to do right now? I'm not like well, I gotta do this style of lifting, and this many weight sessions, and this much fricking cardio, and this much yoga. I do what I'm directed to do each day. If I feel unsure, because I always move my body every day. If I feel unsure, I literally will stop and I'll be like, should I do gym or yoga today? What is my soul telling me? Or is it just a walk or something? Occasionally it's nothing, but that's extraordinarily rare. Like maybe two days in the whole year. Right? But it's not like I go to do this much gym, this much cardio, this much yoga, this many walks for stress relief. Oh my God, imagine you had to live that way. How exhausting, right? But I used to live that way in all areas. So, it's not something I gotta consciously practise ... It seems that my sceptre has a little bit of mould on it. That seems unusual. Or it's just some green stuff that's being revealed. I don't consciously practise it, but I'm definitely practising in the ... what's it called? Nutrition and fitness area anyway, because my practise is the way that I live my life, right? And even when I do something like eat massive indulgent breakfasts that I had this morning, then I'm kind of reminding myself. I sort of smile to myself and I'm like, huh, look at me, being all free and eating what I want. And I feel really proud of it as well, by the way, because I spent 10 to 15 years obsessing over every fucking thing that went into my mouth. So, there's a massive sense of self satisfaction that comes from eating the damn french toast, or the cake, or whatever it is when I eat that sort of stuff, or even when I'm just eating greens and lean protein, and stuff, which is a lot of the time. Either way, I'm continually reminding myself yeah, I get to choose what feels right for me. I trust myself. I have faith that I'll make the right decision for myself, and I know that my results come from what I choose to believe, not from how things add up. My results don't come from what I eat or how I work out. My results come from inside of me. Same with money. What if you trusted yourself? Imagine. Can you just imagine how fabulous your life would be? It's so easy. You literally just get to sit around all day fricking waving things to people on the internet and doing whatever you want, having a good old chat. You're not sitting here worrying. I spent my whole adult life up until a few years ago, and even in some areas still recently, worrying, always. Like there was always something hanging over me. Am I gonna look good enough for that event tomorrow, or you know, do I need to go and do another workout today, or did I eat the wrong thing earlier, or did I say the wrong thing earlier on Facebook, or am I gonna ... How should I make sure I follow up with that person and close the deal? Or what should I be selling? Oh my God, there was so much fucking energy just being exhaustively drained out of me all day, every day. And it was so exhausting. I said exhausting two times, but it was how I lived my life for years. I really gotta give myself props for being able to stay upright and standing the entire time. No wonder I needed so much sex. But I think I need even more now, because I'm even more alive with energy, and vibrancy. So, the practise can be automatic, is what I'm saying. The practise can be the way you live your life. Now, the only area where I still gotta consciously practise more, is my love and [remomant 00:37:41]? [remomance 00:37:42]. Love and [remomance 00:37:43]. Love and relationships and romance area. But I'm getting so into flow there also, right? I spoke about this a lot recently. But I just take a little bit more time and attention in that area. I'll notice myself coming from fear something still, or I can feel that a fear reaction is rising, or I can feel like what I would maybe say or do if I allowed fear to rule me. I just catch it. I catch it always. I don't act from fear or scarcity, or lack or neediness in that area anymore. I don't believe I do. I think I've shifted that now. Touch wood. But I notice that I catch it quite frequently, and then I I kind of process it, I do my inner work around it, I do journaling on it, I tune in. I notice when I'm like oh my God, I'm freaking out about something, or what somebody said or didn't say on a message, or what I'm gonna say to him, or whatever. And then I catch it and I'm like, okay, and I sit down and I fucking journal that shit. I write it down. Why am I feeling this? What is this really about? What story is this that's springing up from previously? What do I need to understand here? What do I wanna choose to believe, feel, what are the emotions and the thoughts that I desire to bring in around this, and then finally, okay. What aligned action, if any, should I take in this area? I set my intentions, these are the desires and the results that I want, I fucking release and detach from it, because that's a critical part of manifestation, and then yeah. I go what action, what aligned action, if any, should I take around this? And that's roughly my process, right? So, I take time to do that. I had a freak out thing earlier this week, and insecurity that came to the surface that I noticed, relevant to a conversation with a man, and then I just, I probably spent an hour working through it in my journal. I took the fucking time, because I believe that I can have it all, in that area, the same as how I do with my money, my body, my lifestyle, my fun and adventure, et cetera, and I am willing to invest the time in training my fucking mindset and shifting my soul into that place of flow, and into faith based response, but it did take time and attention. And then I took completely talked myself down from that hill of freaking the fuck out, to where I felt totally grounded, totally sure of myself, totally in faith, totally in abundance and certainty, and like yes, I get to be who I am, and I get to receive love, and I'm a fricking badass, and I feel hot, and I feel amazing, and bring it on world. And then, from that place, I'm like cool, cool. What, if anything, is the aligned action I need to take in that area, right? And that is my practise in that area. It's not automated exactly like the other areas, as I'm explaining to you, right? My point is, that for me to get to the level of ease and flow that I have now around money, where it's like I have ... Of course money just flows to me every day, as much as I just kind of pluck out of the air, more and more every month, with greater and greater ease, soul mate clients only. I don't gotta do anything, I never gotta worry about it, it's just always there. Same with my fitness and health. To get to there, to get to here, I did that. I did that fucking inner work. I took the time. Every time my shit came up, I sat my ass in the chair as soon as I could, and I did the journaling work on it, and or I spoke with whoever it was that was supporting me at the time about it, and I ran it through my head while I was maybe working out, and I figured it the fuck out. And I noticed where fear was ruling me, or scarcity was ruling me, and I asked myself repeatedly, every fucking day in my journaling, for years. I would ask what would alignment look like right now? What would I be saying, selling, doing in my business if I knew I was completely safe with money, if I already had a million dollars in the bank, and if I was completely in alignment? It was a fucking practise, you guys. I remember that question I asked every morning for years, like two to three years I would say every fucking morning. I remember sitting in café up there, in Broad Beach, which is the next town over, café that opens at 4AM down there. I always know where all the early morning café is. Wherever I am in the world. And every morning it was my practise, right? I just cannot emphasise enough that you've got to have a mindset practise, and if you're not willing to do that, please, for the love of God, leave the fucking live stream and leave my community because I cannot help you. If you're not willing to invest into shifting your own soul and into being that next level version of yourself, there is not a single fricking thing that I can say to you or desire to say to you that is going to help you to make money, reach your soul mate clients, make a fuckload of money, I already said that, why not have some more? Have your dream body, have a soul mate relationship, have it all. I do the fucking work, and by that I mean the work of how my thoughts or my mind and my beliefs and my emotions operate. I am disciplined enough to train my mind. Your mind is like an errant fucking monkey child. It will do whatever the fuck you want if you don't give it direction. You get to choose. And when you take the time to choose how you're gonna think, and to cultivate a mindset of abundance, and a belief system of abundance, you get to the point where it's fucking inherent to who you are, which is how I am with money, how I am with my fitness and body, how I am rapidly becoming with love and romance. I'm so just on the edge of complete, complete flow and ease and certainty in there as well, and it's shifting every fucking day. I've already shifted so much from like two months ago, or four months ago, or a year ago, because I've been doing the work. I've been applying myself. I've been committed the it. I refuse to accept anything except the standard of excellence. I know that when I'm next in a official serious, committed relationship of some kind, where it's like an official thing, that it's gonna be something that people are like, oh my God, I wish I had a relationship like that. And I'm not saying that because I want people to be envious of stuff that I have, but more so to impress upon you, like I know that people wish they could make the money I make, live the lifestyle I make, have the body and have it all. Well, you gotta have that practise. And you've gotta be committed that you get to have it that way. There is no fucking way I would have any relationship of whatever sort of classification or labelling, and this is already true in the current way that I do love and romance, that this ... Any connection, however that connection is playing out and carrying out, my current connections are all fricking based on what feels right and aligns for me, and what is in keeping with my goals, and even the guy who is important to me in my life, right? Who I talk to all the time, we talk all the time about communication, and learning new communication, and growing in communication, and expressing your true actual feelings. Like oh my God, imagine, right? And it's a continual growth thing from both sides, and that is something where I'm just ... I'm not available for anything other than that. How can people be in a relationship where there's not openness and communication? But I was. Fear, obviously. Right? So, I know that people can be. But my point is, I've committed myself to getting to have it all in all areas. So, in this area, like in other areas, I just do the work. I do the fricking work, and I only bring in people into my life who are doing the work in their area, in their life also. And people who I was giving my time and energy and body to, et cetera. For example, last year, well I still have fun to go on a date, and that sort of thing. That's fine, I've got nothing against that as a general sort of social thing, or a fun night out or whatever, and yeah. That's totally fine. But as far as me continuing a relationship with somebody, like really, when I get to the point where if I've seen somebody two or three times, if that's not a growth orientated person, if we're not vibing on a soul level, it's not like I'm trying to just be superior or something like that. It's just that, that doesn't align with how I choose to live my life. Just like my soul mate clients and my soul mate clients, I'm just not gonna work with somebody who doesn't choose to apply themselves to business and life in a certain way. So, even part of my growth into greater alignment and flow in this area, was I just allowed some connections with guys that I had been seeing to fade away, but I was like, well, yeah. I still have a great time every time we catch up, it's fun, we go to dinner, we do all the things, you know, have sex, et cetera. Yes, that's a need and a requirement as well, so that's certainly part of it, but it's kind of like ... If the conversation's not flowing, if it's starting to feel like a little bit of hard work, if it's kind of like, well, I'm pretty much just doing this for the attention and the sex, then okay, well I could still certainly do that if I choose to anytime, and I would, right? For sure. If I choose to. But it's also, hmm, how does this tie in with what I actually believe? How does this tie in with faith based living, right? How does this tie in with the knowledge that I have inside of me, that I can have only epic soul mate connections? And people say it's really hard to find a conscious guy, or it's hard to find a man who's growth orientated, and then their hot, and they're whatever, and whatever, and whatever. And I'm like, well, you're gonna get what you expect to see. That's the truth of the matter. I started journaling earlier this year on being surrounded by conscious men who are freaking smart, fun, funny, successful, who totally honour me as a goddess and a queen, and tell me the nice things, and treat me in a way that I love to be treated. And elevate me and take care of me, and I didn't even just mean romantically, right? I meant in a general sense, being surrounded by conscious men. Only the other day, I think it was like a week or so ago, I remember just thinking holy shit, today alone I've had four amazing epic conversations with incredible conscious men. I am surrounded by conscious men. My friends, my clients, people who I connect with online, and also in the romantic area as well, right? But really, like all my male connections now I just ... I have such amazing male friends, who are so fricking conscious and elevated, and I'm only gonna date in that way as well, and I'm only gonna give my energy in any sort of [inaudible 00:47:28] sense in that way, and it's also what I expect and what I see in the small percentage of men that are actually in my own community, several of which are here on this live stream. Yes. Exactly. Pete's just like, "Here I am." And Brandon's here as well, right? So, there's two examples right there. And it's just all these things come about when you choose to believe, right? I'm using that area as a big example because it's an area that I've been particularly focusing on for me and my life, as you know. And like I said, because I've practised, because I've repeatedly practised releasing fear ... I didn't have fear around attracting conscious male friends or clients. Actually, that was more so obviously for the love romance area, but still, I gotta practise that. I've repeatedly practised it. When fear's rising, when you say to yourself maybe that's unrealistic, or I couldn't have a connection like that, or I can't tell I'm what I'm really feeling like this. And it's like, well is that true? Or is that fear? What would faith say? What would my soul tell me to do? What would alignment look like? And then you fucking practise. And the practise maybe scary as hell, super fucking uncomfortable, insane, right? In that area. That's why you practise. You practise so that it becomes easier and easier to show up as that version of yourself, okay? So, right now, where is the area where you most need to practise? What is the area that you've gotta practise in? Because I could tell you that you can get to absolute flow and ease, as I have shown and demonstrated, and as I continue to create for my own self, you can have all of that. You know it. But you've gotta be willing to take the time to catch it when fear is ruling you, and if you're not even sure, then fricking, start getting your ass in the chair every day and looking into that in your journaling, and figuring it out, or working with me, or whoever you wanna work with, and getting it all sorted. And then you practise what would faith look like? What would soul alignment look like? What would I be doing if was coming from belief? That's the blueprint. Michelle says, you totally get what you expect. Just expect differently and what ... Right. And there's so many things that I've written in my journal, where I feel like that's outrageous, that would be too good to be true, right? I think even the conscious man thing, I felt that at one point. I was like well, you know, a lot of the really conscious men seem to be kind of like not my type, like super ... I'm sorry. But super hippy-ish, which is not my type. And so, I kind of had a belief system there, and then I was just like and what if I chose to believe that the conscious men that I call in are super in their kind of alpha masculine, and in the way that I'm attracted to? And so, that's obviously what I then created, because I chose to believe it. But I remember thinking that it wasn't really possible or available, and then I decided to journal it every single day anyway, which is what I do with everything, right? There's many things that I'll journal where I'm like it seems so far off. And I'm like too bad. I keep claiming it as available now. Manifestation is all in the now. Woo. Okay. By the way, I got one place left in Rich Hot Empire. Six weeks to work with me one on one. You and me. Build your soul mate cult tribe, make money doing what you love, create a multi seven figure empire and beyond through low end, high end, whatever you wanna do. What is your calling, what is your soul work? Do you need to do the mindset work on that, and would you like to know everything about how I've built this business? Rich Hot Empire is about all of that and so much more. It is unlimited one on one access to me. It is going to be closed off very, very, very fricking soon. It'll probably slightly oversell, because I've already got several conversations in the works. But in theory, I can do one more place if you message me ASAP about that. I will send you a overview and details, and we can talk through it all, and yes. Well, there you go. Dee's just claimed that last place, right there. Which I kind of already knew anyway. The conversations that I'm still having with people right now are all closed out. Those conversations obviously, right? So, as always, I sell things out, or I slightly oversell them even, if I've had like four people that are messaging all me at the same time for the last final place, which tends to keep fricking happening, because I call in the energy of it. And that's how it's done. And this is a faith thing as well. I teach about that when you're a client. I teach about it anyway, in lots of different ways obviously, with my free online content. so, leave me a comment, send me a message. Tell me the things, say yes to you. Press fricking play, and I already said press fricking play. I'm gonna say it anyway. Don't forget, life is now, press play. Thank you for watching. Bye.